The Trouble with Fate

by Leigh Evans

  My spine melted against its rough bark as the wind died around me.

  I was in someone’s mind. Deep within. No walls to repel me. My curiosity, always such a besetting sin, came boiling up within me as urgent as the need to drink, to eat, to think. I dipped into a soul’s mind—not a dreaming one but a sentient being on the edge of waking.

  Oh my. Mad-one’s lip curled into an addict’s knowing smile as I tipped my head back in near rapture.

  The soul inside the pine is open for my exploration. My vision faded. Wondrous.

  She was so different from me. Whole, not fragmented. She didn’t live under a deluge of questions, or wade daily through a muddy stream of doubt. This Fae soul lived for the field, for the family, for wide-open spaces. Layers of scent delighted her, and each one she greeted with a gourmand’s appreciation. Oh my, I thought, digging deeper. So sure. So steady. She was satisfied, and yet not self-satisfied.

  Is this truly how others felt? Safe?

  Excitement and pleasure streaked through me. It was the best type of stealing: I pocketed her memories like they were diamonds, chuckling at the things she found funny, marveling at the things she held dear. Grubby children and the grizzled face of an ugly man; all made beautiful by the way she loved them. Ah, that was it—the essential difference between her and me—she loved in the present tense. More stunningly, my dreamer knew herself to be—yes, there’s the source of the biggest warmth—loved. She accepted it, without inspection or question. I followed the thread of that warm comfort, and found “him” everywhere and yet nowhere, until … ah, there … yes, there. Her soul was wound around him like Merry was wound around that cold, lifeless amulet.

  And then, my eyes were open, and I found myself staring at the bleak weight in Mad-one’s eyes.

  “The first time you touch a soul,” said the Mystwalker, “you begin to understand the possibilities of your gift.” She spread a hand. “Here, as long as you fulfill your duties to the Court, you may live any life you choose. You can discover every secret once thought well hidden. Without ever leaving this realm, you can experience every sensation, every adventure. If you’re gifted, you can alter souls and destinies.

  “The Old Mage would have taught this. He would have trained you, and you would have understood that you have been given the great honor of serving the Court, and that your sacrifice protects those who need the most protection. But you were trained by the Black Mage, who taught you only what he understands—deception and guile. His skills are weak, his knowledge of Threall ever weaker, but his desire for power strong. Consider very carefully his instructions to you and your allegiance to his service. And think too of this. If you live past the dawn, I can show you so much more. If your wish is to plunder, I’ll show you where to find the sweeter trees. But now, you must come away from this place. These woods are not safe for our kind. Things wander here in the daylight hours.”

  I pushed myself away from the dreaming Fae soul and felt the pang of disconnect when my fingers left her callused trunk. Alone again. The loneliness that I wore like a cloak was wrapped tight around me once more.

  Mad-one sidled up to me, but I didn’t flit away from her this time. I didn’t fear her anymore. If anything, I felt—

  The Mystwalker leaned past me to place her fingers on the ridged bark spine of the fir. Her eyes slanted into slits of purring pleasure as she invaded the other spirit’s mindscape. “You didn’t leave a sign that you had passed.” She shook her head reprovingly, her eyes glassy and unfocused. “You must always leave a mark. Your purpose is to search for agitators and impose the will of the Court.” Mad-one reached out to briefly touch the adjoining tree. “They have been together a long time, these two.” She raised her head and looked upward where the balls of light were almost melded together. “True soul mates. They believe themselves above our command.” A quick inhale, followed by a tiny smile.“This creature has never felt the touch of a mystwalker before. She’s a moment from waking. She’s trying to evade me.” The ball of light above her flashed a bleat of stark yellow.

  Both arms wrapped around the tree, Mad-one leaned her cheek against the rough trunk, and spoke. “He lusts for another. Someone younger and more beautiful. He sees her in his head, every day. He yearns for your death so that he can be free to go to her.” The corner of her lip lifted. “When you wake, he will be gone.”

  The Mystwalker of Threall waited another beat, then stepped back, satisfaction twisting her youthful features into a smile that turned my stomach. She wiped her cheek clean with her hand before dragging it across the shining blue fabric of her gown.

  Heartsick, I touched the pine whose sweet spirit had just been marked. Inside that near-awake mind, I could feel the dreamer’s hurt, cold and numbing, spreading outward from that wound of doubt. My jaw hardened. I put my lips close the fir’s bark, and concentrated. “He loves you. He always will. He dreams of no other. This was nothing but a bad dream.”

  “You dare challenge my mark?” she shrieked.

  Kind of reminded me of the Wicked Witch of the West, the way Mad-one’s voice rose, and damn me, if I didn’t taunt her with a smile. Unfortunate choice, that. Suddenly, we were face-to-face, our breaths mixing in the close air between us.

  “You will regret your actions.” Her eyes were slits. “This is my kingdom.”

  “Go ride your broom,” I said through tight lips.

  With that, she put her hands on me. I felt her cold fingers bite into my shoulders.

  But her mind. It tried to invade mine.

  “What are you?” she asked, deeply puzzled.

  Same song, different singer. I curled my fingers into a fist with the thumb on the outside, just like my brother had taught me, and bopped her hard, square on her freaking, long, aristocratic nose.

  She cupped her snoot with a shriek.

  Who’s top dog now, Mad-one? I stood firm, both fists clenched, ready to give her another poke.

  “Is this how the Black Mage chooses to provoke me? He sends me a creature such as you?” Mad-one said, winding up on a rant. “Who believes me to be no more than a lowly witch? Riding a broom of twigs?” Oh yeah. She was pissed. One arm up, one knee bent up, the Mystwalker levitated skyward. She hovered ten feet above me, hair floating in an eerie nimbus around her head.

  And then she did something truly horrible.

  She glided over to the male tree’s soul-light. Her fingers stretched for its tether.

  “Don’t,” I said sharply.

  But she did. She tore the glowing ball from its berth, and held it tightly under her arm, pressed close to the ribs that protected her frozen heart. Then she glided downward and away, heading back toward the hedgerows and the clearing.

  Two feet lower and I could have snagged her foot. I lifted a hand to send a stream of magic at her, but … what could I use? There were no convenient broken tree limbs on the wood’s ground. No rocks, no stones. Just moss, blue haze, and soul-balls.

  I ran at her heels, calling, “Give him back, bitch.”

  Her head turned, her hair sliding over her shoulder. She smiled. “If you wish to save this soul, then you must follow me out of the wild.” She glided through the gap in the hedgerows, indifferent to the smell of smoke, or the thorns that tried to catch her gown.

  She glided faster than I could run, with one shoe.

  But when I cleared the hedge—another streak of blood marring my arm—I found Mad-one hovering, halfway to the safety of her branch barricade. She sank slowly to the ground, her attention focused on the sky above the black walnut. It looked … pinpricked. Natural light glittered through each tiny point. As I watched, a section of the gray canvas tore. Just a small rend, which widened until it was a jagged smile of blue, through which bright white light streamed.

  “Daylight comes,” she said flatly.

  A streak of sunlight fell on her face. She lifted her head for a second to absorb it, looking young and unblemished. Her mouth parted slightly as she watched another tear appear in the hea
vens. Sunbeams streamed across the clearing’s carpet of emerald moss. The transition from gray-shrouded night to sun-dappled day happened very quickly. In a matter of moments, every bit of pewter had been banished except for one dark cloud. The sun—or whatever was the source of the daylight—hid behind it.

  But Threall still supported the flat-earth theory. Where a gray blanket had obscured the hypothetical division between land and sky, now there was only cerulean-blue heaven. The land past the walnuts looked like a precipice to an endless plunge toward … what? Earth? What would happen if I walked over to the edge of Threall’s world? What would I see? While I speculated over that, a plume of white materialized. Like a rocket’s vapor trail, but completely vertical and alive like water—it streamed upward, disappearing into the heart of the dark cloud.

  “What is it?” I breathed.

  She stroked the ends of her long hair. “The passage to Merenwyn.”

  “A portal to Merenwyn?” I frowned at her. “I thought they were all closed?”

  “Are they?” Then with a small lift of her shoulder, “Such things matter not to a mystwalker.”

  I slanted my eyes toward the soul-ball tucked under her left arm. Yeah, it looks like a lot of things don’t matter to a mystwalker. Casually, I took a step closer. Then, I pointed to another, much smaller, thinner stream of white that had sprung out of the central plume. It forked in two, and then folded back onto itself, so that its end was nothing more than a hook. “And that?”

  Her fingers paused, mid-rake, in her hair. “An endless hell for the wrong traveler. False trails such as those emerge from the portal walls. They are traps for the unwary or unschooled.” She pointed to the hook at the end of the stream. “Observe how the false trail has turned back onto itself. Very soon it will collapse.”

  Creeping horror. “What happens to the people inside them?”

  “They become part of Merenwyn’s portal. Their essence is absorbed into the fabric of its walls.” She stared at it for a bit, chewing the inside of her lip. “You can hear their cries some evenings.” Then she looked at the soul-ball as if she had forgotten it was there and bent to place it by my feet. “Your Mage did not call you home,” she said. “You should find shelter. They will be mourning the loss of this one and searching for its killer.”

  She started walking toward her beech, before I could ask her who “they” were.

  I crouched for the soul-ball—oh Goddess, he’s awake and calling for his soul mate—and tore after her. “Come back!” I yelled. “It’s not dead yet!” I ran after her, holding the pine tree’s spirit gingerly in my grasp. We caught up to her before she’d reached the sanctuary of her enclave. “You have to put it back where it belongs,” I demanded. “You can’t leave that woman to mourn.”

  Mad-one turned around, much too slowly and deliberately. “It will serve as a lesson to her.”

  “What, for cruelty?” I held the ball tighter. “Because I can’t see any other lesson she’d learn.”

  She dipped her head toward the soul-light. “He has the instincts of an agitator. With his absence, she will spend every waking moment caring for the crops so that she has food to feed her children. She will have little time to ponder his political views. I made a balanced decision. She has her children and the rot of his destructive thoughts has been cut away.”

  “You don’t know her.” The soul inside the sphere was worried, deeply so. “She’ll grieve herself to death.”

  “That will be her choice. I gave her a choice.” She shook her head, and looked past me. “Do you find it beautiful?”

  I cast an anguished glance at the soul-light. “Yes.”

  “But you can’t reach it.”

  I looked up, confused. Her gaze was fixed beyond me, to the blue sky and its plume of white. “You behold the passage to Merenwyn and you wish it possible to slip into the sky and retrace your passage home, as safely as one of its portal travelers. To forget about Threall. To go back in time, to a safe place, when all you understood was the comfort of your home, and the warmth of its hearth. But it is a thing a mystwalker can never do. We cannot turn back time. The first thing we are taught is not to grieve.”

  Mad-one shook her head, and walked toward the trembling archway of branches, holding her long skirt aside with one pale white hand.

  “You’re everything my mum said you’d be,” I shouted after her. “Soulless and mad.”

  She turned, her eyebrows raised. Then she said, “Wind.”

  A split second later the soul-ball and I were skidding across the clearing. The nails on my free hand made a furrow in the moss. I made a lunge for the sharp end of a half-rotted stump but overshot. The soul-ball and I did a tandem bounce off its crumbling remains and then we were in the arms of Mad-one’s wind, the landscape a blur around us—gleaming lights, dark forests, and wind-whipped walnut trees.

  I closed my eyes—please, Goddess, save me or make it quick—before we sailed into the blue void.

  Thud.

  My back hit the half-dead walnut’s bulk in a breath-catching smack.

  We ricocheted off that dead branch, were shoved by the force of the wind straight through several broken boughs—ow, ow, ow—until we smashed into another that didn’t give under our weight.

  But on impact, I did the unforgivable.

  I dropped the ball.

  As per my prayer, salvation came for one. No help was granted for a soul-light that was nothing more than a bit of parchment over a brilliant sphere of light. So light, so flimsy, so fragile. It got caught on a cradle of foliage at the end of a mostly dead branch. I stretched for it, feeling the strain in my gut and my shoulder. My nail pierced its thin skin—he’s wailing, he’s wailing—then the net of greenery holding it parted, and the ravenous wind plucked it from me.

  The soul sailed off the ends of Threall, its inner light bleating, straight into the restless, white plume of air. A noise splintered across the clearing. Horrifying. Screams. Not one from one voice, but from many. Aborted and choked, but I heard them.

  I swear I did.

  I buried my head in my arms.

  “I will find your soul,” called Mad-one into that hollow silence. “The Black Mage’s spell of protection will not keep you eternally safe from me. When it wears off, I will search for your tree. But first, I will find those that you hold precious. The first soul I will feed to the wind will be a friend. Then I’ll find a sister, a brother, perhaps a lover. I’ll cause pain and grief to every person you hold fondly in your heart.”

  Lexi … Lou.

  “You are not worthy to call yourself one of our number.” Her voice climbed. “A true mystwalker is trained and educated. But it is evident by your speech, and your graceless manner that you have never spent so much as a month in apprenticeship. What were you? A farmer’s daughter? A miller’s child? One with a set of doting parents who kept your gifts well hidden? Though something happened, quite recently, did it not? Somehow your weak spark of talent was discovered and you were taken to the Black Mage. Did he promise you freedom if you traveled to Threall? Did he tell you his wards would keep you safe? Did he instruct you to hurt me and those I guard? You shall not. I am always on guard. The Black Mage lied and abandoned you to my care—a provocation one day that he will rue. As will you—before I grant you death, I will make you grovel in grief and mourning.” Mad-one clapped her hands together. The branches held aloft by her magic began shuffling back into their places, until there was no crack in her barricade. From within it she said, “There is none to keep you safe from my wrath.”

  I pressed my cheek against the walnut’s deeply furrowed bark.

  I want to go home.

  I said the last thing inside my own head. I know I did.

  The mostly dead walnut replied, “All you need do is wish for it.”

  Oh crap, I’m one freak out short of a twig fence and tree conversations.

  A dry chuckle. In. My. Head.

  I’ve got to get the hell out of here before the munchkins s
tart singing.

  “Wish for it,” repeated the nut tree.

  I feel sheepish about the next bit. I didn’t spare time to wonder why the tree was talking to me. I didn’t search for its ball of light to check to see if it was scary looking or benevolent. I didn’t ask it a single helpful question—for example: Do you know where my brother is?

  Instead, I curled my legs around the branch and put my hands together in a prayer position. I thought of where I wanted go. Not to a dreary apartment, or Bob’s car, or even to Creemore. I thought of a person, instead of a place. Someone who made me feel like I could have a home. Yeah, I know. A tad on the hopeful, mad side. But hell, I was already listening to a mostly dead tree’s travel advice.

  Then I said, “I wish to go home.” And holy crap—suddenly I was falling, wingless and sharp—the same sort of sickening jolt you experience when your body drops off to sleep before your brain does, except in this case it was a longer fall. I had mists to breeze past, clouds to tumble through, and gray-blue sky to plummet from before I landed in the real world, hard enough to knock me out cold.

  * * *

  It’s getting tedious, waking up confused.

  Could have sworn I landed hard and went splat. And yet, here I was, standing upright in the strip club’s parking lot, knees wet, hands stinging, my fingers wrapped around the handle of Trowbridge’s gun. The rain must have started again while I was soul-traveling. I wiped a bead of it off my chin.

  Bob’s Taurus was five feet behind me. The strip club’s door perhaps less than that. Disorienting. I thought I’d left my body in the car.

  How’d I get here?

  I looked down at my shoes.

  My feet were pointed toward the club’s door.

  Another rap song ended. The new tune’s beat was more seductive, less in your face. A woman could move to the song. Sway to it like a cobra as men with glazed eyes and bomber jackets a size too small watched with appreciation that never peaked and never waned.

  “I want to go home.”

  Faced with a decision, I usually choose the most obvious solution.