by Leo Hunt
“Do you like it here?” I ask my dog, whatever it is he’s become.
Yes yes.
“Do you miss me?” I ask. “I miss you.”
Meet again.
“You mean right now? Or we will meet again?”
Again again.
“I don’t understand.”
Good boy, Ham says in my mind. Meet again.
We walk farther down. I can no longer see stairs below my feet, or walls. If the temple was inside the sleeper’s eye, then this stairway must be leading us down through the cord of the eye, into its mind.
Ham’s shape is wavering, stars winking into existence around him, no longer looking much like a dog. He’s a vein of light.
I’m falling into the stars, pale galaxies whirling around me, and I’m losing sense of where my body is, of how big or small I am, and I see shifting gray landscapes beneath me, small as the maps of a board game, like rough panes of smoked glass, and I see ancient mountains of gray stone and gray forests with black rivers running through them, plains and prairies and deserts without color, and I see a girl walking through fog with her coat wrapped tight around her, a girl with short red hair and a fur-lined parka, and I reach out with a hand beyond size or form and I twist the world so she finds herself at a stone circle, a seam between the gray place and ours, but before I can see what happens to her she’s gone, and now I see black deserts scarred with a river of bloody red flames, tall keeps with walls and gardens in sickly nightmare colors that none living could name, and I hear terrible bells ringing and see mourning processions of creatures I can’t describe, and I fall farther still through bottomless deeps of silver mist, and I see three pilgrims chained with black stones walking by the side of a great river, two men and a woman who covers her face, and I reach out again and shorten the river, drawing it tight like a string and bringing them closer to the lake they seek, before I’m gone again, falling into an ocean of warm sunshine, a river of golden light, islands with flags flying in colorful rows, I see fruit trees with people sitting under them, beautiful fields of animals grazing, rainbow-hued creatures I never saw in my life, and like that it’s out of reach and I’m flying through layers of fog and ash, frozen light, seething walls of fire, all the wards between this place and others, and I find myself landing on cold wet ground, with mist around me and tall gray trees, with a girl with black hair and wide green eyes standing before me, and she opens her mouth to speak.
“Luke? Is that you?”
“Who else?” I ask.
“I thought —” Elza gapes at me. “For a moment you were different.”
“How do you mean?”
“You were made out of stars. Like a hole cut into the night sky.”
I reach out to her, and she throws herself into my arms. I crush her tight against me. She kisses me and then pulls away.
“You’re still cold,” she says. “Are you . . .”
“Let’s not worry about that right now.”
“Are you dead?”
“No,” I say. “Berkley’s gone, Elza. I killed him.”
“How is that possible?”
“Inside the Lake. The Shrouded Lake. I unraveled him. I used one of the stars there. I can barely make sense of it myself. What happened to you?”
“I ran when you said. Berkley wasn’t watching me. All he could think about was you and the Tree. He was so sure he was about to win. Then I got lost in the fog, and I’ve been walking, trying to find my way back to Holiday. I don’t know where we are.” Elza gestures at the fog, the trees, the grayness. “This still looks a lot like Deadside.”
“The Barrenwhite Tree promised to let Dunbarrow go,” I say, “if I got rid of Berkley. I think we should go speak to it about that.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
“It will,” I say. “These things, their whole world is built on promises. If they promise you something, they’re bound by it. That spirit will keep its word.”
“And you’re sure?”
I pause.
“Reasonably.”
“Oh, fantastic.”
“One thing at a time, OK? Berkley won’t bother me again. I’m free. I really did it. Now, which way to the Devil’s Footsteps?”
Elza frowns. “This way, I think. I was running really fast, and you know how easy it is to get turned around in this fog.”
We move off in the direction she was pointing. The forest is mute and hueless, a dim expanse of tree trunks and roots and low bushes, all glittering with frost. The ground is white snow, heaped into drifts by the wind. Elza must be freezing cold. Flickers of blue light play through the trees ahead.
“How long have you been out here?” I ask as we walk.
“I don’t know. It’s hard to keep track. How long did you spend in the place you went to?”
“No idea.”
The glow cast by the Barrenwhite Tree is growing stronger. The air is filled with a languid flow of light, greens and blues shimmering in waves around us. There are bodies tangled in the roots, sleeping figures with snow on their faces. I try not to think about what Berkley had me do, eat that poor drained gray spirit. I ate your brother. No. You’re gone. I don’t need to think about you anymore.
We pass a tall oak tree made from stone, and we’re at the passing place again, the gateway that the Barrenwhite Tree claimed as its own. The snow is shallow here, with a circle scorched on the earth where I fought my father. The Tree hasn’t changed; it’s still an unearthly tangle of ice and light, its trunk glittering like a lightning strike that froze at the moment it touched the ground. I clutch Elza’s hand in my four-fingered grasp and keep my other hand on my sword hilt. Margaux Hart is seated in the snow before the Tree, her legs crossed, like she’s meditating. The golden swan mask is lying on the ground beside her. She looks at us as we walk toward her, and her eyes are still rolled right up in her head, so only the whites are visible. I come close enough that I can see the wet pink flesh in the corners of her eyes. She doesn’t stand but looks up at us.
“You have returned,” Margaux says in the Tree’s cold voice.
“I destroyed the Speaker of Secrets,” I say. “I unmade him.”
“I know. I felt it. You did as well as I hoped.”
“Did you know this would happen?” I ask the Tree. “Was this what you wanted?”
“I cannot claim this was my plan, although turns of my cards hinted at this outcome. Horatio told me of his son and of the Speaker’s great interest in you. I saw a chance to antagonize an old foe, and that is all. I never dreamed this night’s petty drama would be his downfall.”
“What was Berkley to you?” Elza asks the Tree.
“A sibling. A rival. A traitor. A lover. I do not expect you to understand our ways. The passions of the first spirits are beyond anything you could imagine.”
“There must’ve been something he did,” Elza says.
“The elders all agreed that the world should be split, that life and death be instituted. We felt otherwise, the Speaker and I. We swore never to harm each other, and we fought them. It was the greatest battle you can imagine, the first war, and outnumbered as we were, I was certain none could stand before us. And he surrendered. He betrayed me, betrayed what we stood for, and bowed to them. And for this they made him a great spirit and made of me what you see today.”
“You said you’d release Dunbarrow,” I remind the Tree. “You said you’d let go of your thralls and make it like this never happened.”
“I did. I swore by the power of eight.”
“So keep your bargain, Tree. Release us.”
“I had hoped you might choose to ascend,” the Tree replies. “I hoped you would forget my promise.”
“I didn’t.”
“I need sustenance,” the Tree complains. “What am I to do?”
“We don’t care,” Elza replies. “You made a promise.”
“I spared you,” I remind the spirit. I keep my hand on my sword. “I spared you, and you swore to let Dunbarrow
go in return. Let us all go, and Margaux, too.”
“She looked into the heart of the black sun,” the Tree says, moving her lips, “and she found me there. I was waiting. She embraced me.”
“We’re not negotiating,” I say. “Let her go, too.”
“Very well,” the spirit says. “You spared me the blade, Luke Manchett, and so I keep my promise. I thank you for this, and also for destroying the Speaker, where by terms of our concord I could not.”
“Without your strength, I couldn’t have done it. I thank you for that.”
“To the outworlds I return, then. To the land of exiles. I bid you farewell, Luke Manchett, Elza Moss. We will not meet again.”
“I hope not,” Elza says.
Margaux lets out a wail, and the Barrenwhite Tree starts to recede, like it’s growing backward, every icy branch and tendril of light retreating back into its frozen trunk. There’s a shrill chiming noise, and the trunk of the Tree, with the figure trapped inside, vanishes into the earth. With a final fountain spray of aqua-green light, the spirit is gone. Gray mist still flows through the clearing. Margaux collapses onto the snowy ground, with no strength left in her body.
“Is it really gone?” Elza asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “But we need to close the gateway again. That’s the last thing.”
Elza opens her mouth, and I pull the stone easily from her gums. She winces.
“Did that hurt?” I ask.
“A little. You hand is really cold.”
I walk over to Margaux, lying on her back in the snow, her red hair like a vivid bloodstain against the white, and I take the second stone from her mouth. I hold the two of them in my palm, and then I realize.
“The third one . . . My stone. Berkley took it.”
“So?” Elza asks me. “You can’t close the gateway?”
I look at the black sword in my right hand. I look around me, at each of the oak trees of stone, and the idea comes to me again that there’s a language written against the gray fog in these bare stone branches, symbols like the ones I saw swirling in the stars in the depths of the Shrouded Lake, and I hold these words in my mind, remember how it felt to be among those stars, remember that we’re made from them.
“We need three,” I say. “But there is a way.”
I drive the black blade into the frozen ground in the middle of the circle of stone trees, push the sword into the gateway that stands between Liveside and Deadside, and I say a word I’ve never heard and could never write down, but the sword understands me and the gateway does, too, and the black sword becomes a stone, weathered and dark, seven feet tall, larger than my hand, even though my hand still grasps it and places it, and my head is filled with a high glassy ringing sound. I release the sword, now a standing stone that looks a little like a blade, and then I plant the other two stones, taken from Elza’s mouth and Margaux’s, into the soil, and as I place them, they grow to become full-size standing stones as well, completing the circle. I breathe out. The gray mist fades away. Around us, the seven stone trees are turning back into living wood.
I hear the Dunbarrow clock tower chiming, church bells ringing. It’s midnight, the beginning of a new year. The fog is gone, and I can see the sky again, stars fixed in their proper positions, the comet just a blue-green streak overhead. We did it. We’re back in the real world, back in Liveside. I turn away from the standing stones.
The snow is still here, smothering the earth. Elza forges her way through it, stepping around Margaux.
“Is that it?” she asks.
“It’s over.”
Elza reaches out to hold me and stumbles straight through me, nearly tumbling into a standing stone.
“Whoa — sorry.”
“I forgot you left your body back in the tent.”
“With Holiday, yeah.”
“So are you . . . dead?” Elza asks me. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
I try to look for my lifeline, the thread of light that connects your body and spirit when you go spirit walking, but I can’t find it. If it’s still here, this must be the thinnest it has ever been. I don’t feel scared, though. I can still read the spread of tree branches against the night sky, see sigils in the curls of Elza’s black hair. I know I can fix this.
“What about her?” Elza asks, pointing to Margaux. “I’m not carrying her all the way through the forest to the school.”
“She’s going to get really cold if we leave her out here.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Luke.” Elza shrugs, looks around the clearing, as if hoping someone else will back her up. “We’ve got to find out what happened to everyone else. We don’t even know where your mum and Darren are. I’m not sure if I’m that worried about the person whose fault all of this is.”
“It’s not Margaux’s fault,” I say. “The Tree took her over.”
“The Tree that we let go,” Elza says. “We just let it go.”
“What else could we do?”
“I don’t know. Just doesn’t seem right.” Elza shivers, looking up at the comet in the sky. “It’ll come back, won’t it? Eight hundred years or so. The comet will appear in the sky again, and the Tree will get hold of another town. And they’ll all be eaten, absorbed, whatever it actually does to those poor people.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Probably. But what can we do about that? To get rid of Berkley, I had to make promises to the Tree. I said I’d let it go. Great spirits take promises seriously. I couldn’t go back on it.”
“I know. I just keep thinking about all those people we saw in the forest —”
“There’s nothing we can do, Elza. We rescued Dunbarrow. We’ll be long gone when the Tree comes back. Eight centuries. We can’t solve every problem.”
She sighs. “I don’t like it, is all.”
“If we stopped it, other people can, too,” I tell her. Do I believe what I’m saying? I’m not sure. But I gave the Barrenwhite Tree my unbreakable word, and now it’s gone beyond our reach. There’s nothing we can do about that.
“Look,” I say, “we should get Margaux somewhere a bit more sheltered, at least.”
“And by we you mean me,” Elza grumbles. “Since you can’t touch anything.”
“Hey, I killed Berkley and closed the gateway, OK? Division of labor.”
Elza grabs Margaux and drags her through the snow, to the edge of the clearing. There are some bushes that have a sort of hollow underneath them, somewhere sheep might shelter from a storm. I can see old scraps of yellowing wool clinging to the branches. Elza hauls Margaux into it, arranges her Apostle’s robe so it covers her skin completely. That’ll have to do for now.
We make our way past the oak trees, through the snow-shrouded forest, following the track down toward the high school. The people tangled up in the roots and branches are gone. The trees are no longer the twisted gray monsters we walked through to get here; instead they’re birches and pine trees, the forest floor crowded with dead orange bracken. The snow crunches beneath Elza’s feet. A clear night sky is visible between the trees.
We break out of the forest and are standing on the rise above the school playing fields, also blanketed in snow, with the square flat-roofed buildings of Dunbarrow High beyond them. There’s a dark dome in the middle of the rugby pitch: the tent Berkley made is still here, and I can see Titus’s armor glinting in the moonlight, heaped where we killed him. Elza walks and I drift, through the scruffy bushes that separate the farthest sports field from the forest, across the snowy grass, and up to the horsehide tent.
“Holiday?” I call. “Are you there?”
Bea’s sleek dark head emerges from the door flap. She barks sharply and runs out to greet us, firelight leaking out onto the darkened snow through the doorway. Holiday follows, looking sickly, her hair a tangle. She holds her wyrdstone out in front of her.
“Who’s that?” she asks us.
“It’s us,” Elza says. “Luke and Elza.”
Still scowling, Holiday keeps the wyrdstone raised. “Don’t move,” she says. She presses the stone against my face, then Elza’s. Nothing happens, and she relaxes.
“It’s really us,” I say. “I promise.”
“I had to be sure,” Holiday replies. “After that thing that looked like Alice —”
“I don’t blame you,” Elza says.
“Is it over?” Holiday asks. “The fog’s gone.”
“It’s over,” I say. “We’re back in the real world. We closed the gateway.”
“I thought you were . . .” she says. “I woke up, and your body was by the fire, and it’s all torn up.”
“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry. It must’ve been scary.”
“I wanted to come find you both, but I was so weak, I could barely stand. . . . Your dog’s been with me, though. What happened to you?”
“Honestly,” Elza says, “I don’t know where to begin.”
“Mr. Berkley . . . the Devil . . . he’s gone,” I say. “The Tree, too. Dunbarrow’s safe. And, Holiday, I’m so sorry for what happened to you. I should never have bound you to the sigil. That was so dangerous.”
“Did it help you close the gateway?” she asks.
I think about the Knight, Dumachus, dissolving into ash and smoke. It was a small step in the scheme of things, but it was a step forward.
“Yeah,” I say. “It did.”
“Then there’s nothing to apologize for,” Holiday says firmly.
There’s a strange buzzing noise.
“Is that someone’s phone?” Elza asks.
“Oh my god, it’s me,” Holiday says. She rummages in the pocket of her parka and pulls out her smartphone. The touch screen is lit up, displaying a call from Alice Waltham, of all people.
“We really are back,” Elza says. “I suppose mine will be working as well.” She takes her phone out and holds the power switch.
“Hello?” Holiday says. “Alice! Are you OK?”
Bea whines and tries to rub her head against my leg. It goes right through. I need to get my body back. I move toward the tent.
“Mum?” Elza says. “Hello! Happy New Year. How are the fireworks?”