The Nine

by Tracy Townsend

  Rabbit zuffed and clambered to his feet, trotting out on Rowena’s heels. The door swung to, the hound’s skittering nails trailing away behind it.

  Erasmus Pardon gazed up at the ceiling. His head ached, too, but not more than his heart. It must have been the bruise from the lead plate troubling him again. It is, he told himself, the only reasonable explanation. The pain lingered deep in his breastbone, a dull memory of something worse.

  “Ann?”

  A smirk colored Anselm’s voice. “Yes, Bear?”

  Pardon felt the ghost of a smile touch his lips. He exorcised it with a practiced scowl. “That damned girl just stole my dog.”

  AFTER

  She did not have a name among her own kind, but, because humans seemed to require one for everything, she called herself Dor. Dor was not really a “she,” either, but humans demanded a sense of what they looked at as much as a name to give it, and so she had trained her wooden flesh into a woman’s shape, curved and mounded, her leaves spilling down over shapely, smooth-barked shoulders. It was merely an aesthetic exercise, though it pleased her that the long, curious stares Men gave her suggested she had done it well.

  Dor combed the Cathedral campus for the third time since the Swinging People did battle with the Men. The first nights, her inspection had been hasty, disorganized. She’d brought two other treelings with her, and they had known so very little of how to bind their bodies into the soil and feel for answers. City-sprouted creatures. Cuttings of cuttings, planted in hothouses. Simpletons. They were nothing compared to Dor’s copse clansmen, who lived in the wilds even in deepest winter. Her clan would have long since left the smoke-cloaked city, their autumn trading done, had the city not been home to such a gathering of Men. The conference ought to leave spoils behind, enough to make being snowbound, trapped through the silent season under plates of glass, worth her people’s sufferance.

  This morning, she brought only one other treeling: her copse mate, Lir, who had shaped as a man this season. Lir knew how to bind into the earth. He would be a good partner, and now, the Men soldiers and constables long since gone, they could work together and find whatever worthies remained.

  There was always something.

  Lir had crossed to the western side of the Cathedral and sunk himself in amid the hedgerows. Dor knelt at the east, hands dug into the deep bed of needles beneath a thicket of larches. Under the blanket of soil and gathering snow, she felt herself extending, thinning, reaching ever outward. She closed her eyes and listened with all her cells. She waited. In the distance, Dor felt Lir’s body twining nearer, covering the ground between them. It was not a fast process. Feeling through the earth for the weight of something foreign upon it could take an hour or more, especially over so much territory. But Dor could not fail to notice something, if it was there. However well hidden to the eye, if there was a presence—the iron tang of a lost gun, the heft of a copper-heavy purse, even the feather touch of a broken necklace laced in among the grass—they would feel it, together.

  Time passed.

  And . . . nothing.

  If Dor had had teeth, she’d have ground them to shavings. The treelings she had brought before would only come in the dark of night, such was their fear of the constables and their truncheons. Cowards. Idiots. Did they know nothing of their own nature? An ax or fire might fell a lanyani, but no city Man ever carried these. Still, Dor had yielded to their fear and put off a proper search until now. She had suffered their picking through the grasses, their bending and hunting hunchbacked, like fools. Like Men. She had suffered their ignorance, waited too long, and now, there would be nothing to show for it, the land already picked clean.

  The last lengths of Dor’s twiggings were sliding past the larches’ roots when the shiver of recognition struck her.

  What is it? Dor heard Lir’s voice in her mind, not as words but as a pulse, a familiar pressing through the fibers of her senses.

  Follow me and see, she replied.

  Dor’s twiggings did not have far to travel. They raced along the root path, Lir’s distant stretched self closing in behind. Together, they wound up the arrow-straight trunk, and smelled sap, and felt the cold greenness, and the brush of needles like starched lace. Together, wedged against the larch’s trunk and a center beam of branch, they found the burden of which the roots had whispered.

  Lir’s twiggings withdrew slowly, caressing the object’s smooth, waxy surface. So perfect, even after days of snow and frost. Lir’s twiggings scraped over Dor’s as she told the distant part of herself to grasp the foreign thing and bring it close.

  It came slowly, eased between the branches. Not a single snowflake shook free as her twiggings passed.

  Dor watched her distant parts grow nearer, thicker, more herself. She stared at what they held.

  Lir stirred in the earth beneath her, winding, wheedling.

  What is it?

  Dor hugged the object to her chest. The snow fell away from it, and yes, it was dry, somehow. She lifted it and stared at its black cover, its thick, unlovely spine.

  Her heels rooted deep down, murmuring a reply.

  A book. It must have fallen from somewhere. The Cathedral, perhaps.

  Damaged?

  Dor opened its cover. No, she answered. Pages fanned in the wind, settling slowly, like breath escaping a body.

  A page of scrawl stared back at her. So strange, she hummed into the earth.

  Why strange?

  Come see, Lir.

  The lines—the words—had begun moving, advancing like a parade of ants. Dor traced them with a slender finger.

  Lir plunged through the earth, rooting his way to her in his eagerness. A burrow line like that of a giant vole traced his path back toward the western side of the Cathedral Commons. Lir unfurled from the snowy ground beside Dor, his limbs untangling and neck craning over her shoulder. The tips of his fingers twined around the hand that held their prize, his words humming into her heartwood.

  Strange, indeed. Where do the words come from?

  I don’t know, Dor answered. It is stranger still that they are written in our people’s symbols.

  But it belonged to the Men.

  Dor closed the book, her fingers stretching, braiding themselves around the cover, binding it shut. Once. It belongs to us, now.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As far back as I can remember reading books, I remember turning to the acknowledgments page and daydreaming about the day I, too, would have the honor of crafting some beautiful statement in tribute to all those who supported my work. Never mind that I would have to have written a book first and found some way to get it published. All of that was quite secondary. The acknowledgments was the sacred space where I would, someday, emphatically demonstrate what it meant for me to be a writer.

  Faced with the reality of writing these longed-for acknowledgments, I realize Past Tracy was something of an idiot. I’ve rarely felt so bereft of words. Yet I owe a great deal to the people who helped this work find its way into print and into your hands, and so, I will do my best despite. Any names omitted or favors done that I neglect to mention specifically are entirely my fault; the people I may slight will know how to find me and collect their due.

  To Bridget Smith, my agent at Dunham Literary (one part Peggy Carter, one part the Morrigan) and Rene Sears, my editor at Pyr (story sister and geekmaven), thank you for investing hundreds of hours of hope, imagination, and talent in my words. It’s an old but unfailingly true adage that the reward for doing your work well is more work. I aim to give you both a lot more work in the future and (hopefully) to prove worthy of it.

  Many others at Pyr put their backs into the effort to see The Nine published, and I owe them each a debt. Special thanks go to Editorial Assistant Hanna Etu, who was a lighthouse of patience, clarity, and calm resolve (even when I lacked anything like these qualities, myself); to Senior Publicist Lisa Michalski, who gave me hope that my words would find their way into your hands; and to copyeditor extraordinair
e Jeffrey Curry, who made them worth reading, at the price of his sanity and a few Bon Jovi memes.

  To my critique partners, Michelle Barry and Maura Jortner: here it is, at long last. There may be no humans alive who have read more versions of this manuscript or invested more time in e-mails and Twitter DMs and phone calls fretting over its future. I can’t imagine surviving any of it without your unflagging enthusiasm and narrative savvy. You will always be first among the Unicorn Ninja Witches.

  To my beta readers: each of you was the source of at least one critical idea without which this book could never have taken its final form. Joseph Maynen (high priest of the Church of Latter-Day Asimovians, the first and best hand seller of my writing), Leah Kind (courageous genre skeptic and eternal friend), Rachel Townsend (incisive as sister and critic, always), Hector Flores (crusher of nonsense and bringer of justice), and David Townsend (husband, coconspirator, knitter of plot holes, author of ambition), thank you a thousand times.

  To my students and colleagues at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy: thank you for finding a new cliff, every day, to push me from. I’ve learned a great deal flapping my arms on the way down.

  To my parents, Ned and Kathy Charlton: I sat down once to see if I could figure out the cost of my becoming a writer through my odd and aimless childhood. The notebooks, the sketchbooks, the summer camps, the computers, the college education. The endless library fines. The used book sales and study abroad. And yet, what must have cost the most was your believing in me, long before I ever believed in myself. Someday, I’ll pay it all back, I swear.

  And finally, because a single entry under beta reading could never say enough: to my husband, David, and also our children, Corwin and Deirdre. You’ve endured pitiful breakfasts, dirty laundry, unpaired socks, forgotten appointments, and lost paperwork these last several years. But now, we have a book to show for it.

  I hope you can forgive me.

  I loved you too much not to write it.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo by Jennifer Bronson

  Tracy Townsend holds a master’s degree in writing and rhetoric from DePaul University and a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from DePauw University, a source of regular consternation when proofreading her credentials. She has served as chair of the English Department at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, an elite public boarding school, where she currently teaches creative writing and science fiction and fantasy literature. She has been a martial arts instructor, a stage combat and accent coach, and a short-order cook for houses full of tired gamers. Now she lives in Bolingbrook, Illinois, with two bumptious hounds, two remarkable children, and one very patient husband.