Skylark

by Meagan Spooner

  Tansy turned around to look at me, walking backward, both eyebrows lifted. She was a tall, round-faced girl with a bright smile despite the ash coloring her face. “Really? And you’re not dead? Still, explains why you look—well, like that.”

  I had not exactly seen a reflection of myself in quite some time, except for a muddled and imperfect glimpse in the lake’s surface. I started to object, and Tansy interrupted with a wave of her hand.

  “I don’t mean to sound critical. It’s pretty impressive. I mean, it’s not like I’ve ever had to survive out there on my own. I’m a lifer, always been here.” Her tendency to chatter suited me fine, as I was having trouble stringing together more than three words at a time. I found myself thinking she and Tamren would get along well.

  “What’s that?” she asked, peering at my shoulder. Nix had been silent and still since the people from the Iron Wood had appeared.

  “This is my—” I hesitated, uncertain what to call it. Surely they wouldn’t appreciate a machine from an energy-starved city being in their hidden village. “Friend,” I said, uncertainly. Nix thrummed its approval.

  “Well, don’t think you can use it to send a message,” she went on. “Transmitters don’t work here. So if you are a spy from one of the cities, good luck trying to tell the others where you are.”

  “One of the cities?” My knees felt weak and wobbly.

  Tansy glanced at me, brows lifted in that characteristic look of surprise. “Yeah. Why, where are you from?”

  “W—we just call it the city. East of here and north. I didn’t know there were others.”

  Tansy nodded, slowly. “Yeah, I think I know which one you’ve come from. It’s one of the ones that never made contact after the wars. Kind of sad, really, all those people thinking they’re all alone. You’re better off here. And speaking of here—”

  We’d reached a strange curtain, a drape of fabric and leaves and paint that hung from the branches high above and stretched away on either side. She pulled it aside at a seam and pushed me through.

  It was as electrifying as walking through a magical barrier. On the other side of the curtain, the world was alive with color and light and movement. There were houses, down on the ground and up in the trees, scattered seemingly at random. People bustled to and fro, wearing clothes brighter than any you’d find in the city. As we stood there, Tansy stripped off an outer coat of the ash-gray clothes, revealing much more normal-looking blue fabric underneath.

  She led me down into the town. People stopped to watch me. Far from looking suspicious or afraid, they looked intrigued more than anything else.

  “We don’t get outsiders very often,” explained Tansy, shooing away some children who came to stare at me, openmouthed. “Usually the only creatures that stumble their way into this place are monsters. And we don’t let them get this far.”

  There was a cold finality in her voice that made me shiver in spite of myself. Even here, in something like civilization, the only solution to the shadow people was unquestioning execution.

  Tansy misread the expression on my face, and touched my elbow. “Oh, don’t worry,” she said quickly. “They don’t come here that often. They seem to know that this is the last place they should come, and they stay away.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not afraid of them,” I said, and as I spoke the words I realized them to be true. I pitied them.

  The town was three dozen buildings that I could see and maybe more hidden from sight. Many of them doubled as both homes and shops, with wide windows overlooking the pathways through the iron trees. Half of them were in the branches themselves, connected by precarious-looking walkways of rope and wood. Children and adults alike crossed without so much as a second’s hesitation, though, so I had to assume they were safe.

  The shops, if that’s what they were, offered pots of clay and of iron, bread, wooden furniture, a whole rack of iron tools, strings of fish and—I averted my eyes quickly when I saw them—slabs of meat hung high on iron hooks. There were bushels of produce so bright and alluring I had to force myself to keep following Tansy. Some of the baskets held things I’d never seen before—after my steady diet of nuts and sour berries, I ached to stuff my pockets with what lay before me.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked finally, with one last look over my shoulder at the vegetable stall.

  Tansy snapped her fingers, bringing my attention back to her with a jerk. She grinned at me. “Don’t worry, we’ll come back later. Market lasts all day today; it’s the rest day. I’m just taking you to Dorian.”

  Though she had spoken what sounded like a first name, there was a reverence in her voice nonetheless that had my skin prickling with sudden alarm. I’d heard that brand of reverence before. That was how we referred to our architects.

  Tansy took me to a rope ladder that led up to one of the houses in the trees. It was no bigger than any of the others, nothing to show that it was anything special. The ladder itself twisted and shook as we climbed, and I tried not to look down as we got higher and higher. Nix whirred and clicked reassuringly in my ear, darting up to the next rung of the ladder and back to my shoulder again.

  By the time we reached the top, my arms and legs were shaking, and my hands burned from the tightness of my grip. Tansy smiled and nudged my shoulder with hers as I stood up. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll get used to it in a couple of days, I promise. Wait here.”

  She ducked inside the door of the house. I heard voices, pitched too low to hear, and I resisted the urge to press my ear against the wood of the door. Nix zipped around to one of the windows, where it crouched, antennae waving furiously.

  After a few moments, the door opened again and Tansy beckoned me inside. It took my eyes some time to adjust, but there were lamps glowing with a strange golden light scattered around the house and after a time, I made out the form of a man standing not far from the window outside which Nix was stationed.

  “Tansy tells me your name is Lark,” he said, walking toward me and extending a hand. “Welcome. My name is Dorian.”

  Behind me, the door opened and closed again as Tansy slipped out, leaving me alone with Dorian. I was surprised to see that he was younger than I’d expected, his youthful round face marred only by the faintest hints of lines around the eyes and mouth. His hair was a dark brown, and as far as I could tell, untouched by gray. As I took his hand, a strange current passed between our joined palms.

  “Thank you,” I said, voice wobbling.

  “Please have a seat,” he said, releasing my hand to gesture to an exquisitely carved chair near a small stove that radiated a gentle heat.

  I sat. His voice had a quiet command that I found hard to resist.

  He sat down opposite me and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Tansy seems to think you’re a Renewable like us,” he said, fixing brown eyes on mine. His gaze was every bit as unreadable as Oren’s, and he had none of the tiny signs and tics that told me what Oren was thinking.

  I nodded, my mouth too dry to form words. I swallowed. “My city was going to keep me captive and use me for energy,” I said, voice cracking.

  “I see,” said Dorian. “I’m not so sure.”

  “What?” I felt my hands tighten around the arms of the chair. “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Dorian, with a smile that did wonders to calm my racing heartbeat. “I only mean that I’m not so sure you’re like us. There’s something different I can’t quite put my finger on.” He flexed the hand that had shaken mine, and I realized that he had somehow read me, and my abilities, when he’d touched me.

  “Are you going to turn me out?” I blurted, my grip on the chair white-knuckled. The idea of going once more into the wild was almost too much to bear. I thought I’d found at last a place where I could click.

  Dorian blinked at me, the first sign of genuine surprise I’d seen. “What—? No, of course not!” He laughed, leaning back in the chair and resting his palms on his
thighs. “Many people here have abilities that express themselves in unusual ways. Tansy, for instance, can only access her power when it rains, or sometimes if the humidity in the air is high enough.”

  Relief washed over me, tinged with confusion. Magic is uniform, simply a power source—or so the Institute teaches. I should’ve realized that couldn’t be true, after seeing the magic do so many different things to the landscape. If magic was different in everyone—then maybe I could fit in here after all.

  “No,” continued Dorian, “you can definitely stay. I regret to say that we’ll have to keep you under a close watch for a while, because we can’t be too careful. But of course you can stay. What skills do you have?”

  The question, and the quick shift in conversation, threw me again. “What ski—uh, I don’t know,” I stammered. “I can build a fire?” As soon as the words left my mouth, I cursed myself for saying them. What use was that, after all? Just because it was a skill that had taken me so long to master didn’t mean it meant anything to anyone else.

  But Dorian only nodded gravely. “Anything else? What did you do back in your city?”

  “Well, I hadn’t been harvested yet, so I hadn’t been given my assignment—”

  “Harvested?” Dorian’s brows lifted.

  “Oh. In my city, in order to power the barrier that keeps the magic in and the monsters out, the Institute takes kids once they’re grown-up enough and harvests their power. We’re not Renewables there—except for me.”

  Dorian stood, crossing to the stove to throw in another chunk of wood. “I see,” he said, not showing as much surprise—or horror—as I would have expected.

  “I wanted to be a historian,” I said. “I like learning about the world before the wars.”

  Dorian nodded, shutting the door to the oven again. “Well,” he said. “We can set you up with something easy, something unskilled, until you figure out what you’d like to do.”

  The words were a dismissal, and I got to my feet. “Thank you for letting me stay.”

  “Of course. Except for the ones who were born here, like Tansy, most of us have escaped from someplace or other who wanted to use us.”

  I hesitated, searching for something recognizable in the set of his expression. “What am I then, if not like you?”

  He shrugged, moving away from the stove and toward the window. “Some unique product of your city, I expect,” he said. “Evolution works differently after the wars. There are so few of us left, compared to what there used to be. Humans have never been forced to adapt quite so quickly before. Perhaps your little spy-fly knows.” He tapped on the window with his fingernail, and Nix zoomed off, startled.

  I scrambled to explain, not wanting Dorian to think I was spying on him—what if they believed me to be an agent of my city come to scout them?—but he waved my spluttering away. “Hush, you aren’t the only one to have brought something from your city with you. We’ve got a couple of machines here, even.”

  I shifted my gaze away from the window. His bed stood in the corner, neatly made up, its single pillow dented in the middle from long use. An exquisitely carved chest of drawers stood low against the wall, below a broad, hand-painted canvas. I recognized it from my lessons at school as a map, full of pins and covered with hand-written notes. I longed to study it, for I was still thinking of Tansy’s off-hand comment that other cities besides mine still existed. But it was the chest of drawers, and the knick-knacks and trinkets that covered its surface, that drew my gaze.

  Dorian saw me looking at the chest. “Gifts,” he said, of the trinkets. “Advice is as valuable currency here as any.”

  There were carved figures, boxes beaten from the iron leaves overhead, rings and tiny puzzles. There was even a folded paper cat that could have been the twin of something Basil would have made. I felt tears sting my eyes and passed a hand across my face.

  “Go on,” said Dorian, his voice soft. “You’re exhausted. Tansy will find you a bed for the night.”

  •  •  •

  Tansy brought me home to her family, which surprised me more than it probably should have. It seemed that family units were much more of a focus here than in my city. There, once you were harvested and got your working assignment, you rarely rejoined your family except on subsequent Harvest Days if you wanted to.

  Tansy’s family barely skipped a beat, her parents setting up a pallet by the stove. They apologized for not having a spare mattress for me, but when I reminded them that I’d been sleeping on the ground for weeks, they subsided a little. I slept more soundly than I had done for a long time, next to the warmth of the stove, with the chatter of Tansy and her parents lulling me to sleep.

  The dawn woke me, as people emerged from their houses as if on a schedule, beginning the day the moment the light penetrated the trees. I rose confused, listening to the sudden noises of life and movement, imagining myself for brief moments to be back in the city, listening to the clockwork dawn. As if nothing had changed.

  When I had dressed myself and eaten a light breakfast, Tansy took me to work with her father. She explained that while she was technically a scout, she often came to help out her father when it was too dry for her magic to be sharp enough to serve her on watch. She called him a worker bee, but wandered off to chatter about something else before I could find out what that meant.

  And so I tagged along with the pair of them with barely restrained eagerness, buzzing with purpose and excitement I hadn’t felt in a long time. I was a part of the world again, in a way I’d never been in the city. Here I could have a reason for being, slip into the role I was best suited for and live my life.

  We walked past the outer ring of houses and down a path densely overgrown with iron trees. The narrow path had been cut through the thicket, and the sharp iron edges filed down, and yet the brambles still caught at my clothing. Tansy moved through it with ease, but I struggled through the grasping fingers of iron, the gloom under the trees pressing in at me.

  We emerged from the tunnel of iron thicket into a valley so beautiful that I stopped breathing. At the heart of the Iron Wood, the trees were alive and thriving. Tall, thick, with the most heady of scents drifting on the air. The only sign that these trees had ever been like the iron ones surrounding them was that they, too, were caught in every season. Flowers and buds and bright, round fruits adorned the branches. Suddenly, I realized why the trees of the Iron Wood seemed to have been planted in rows.

  “It’s an orchard,” I gasped, coming to a halt.

  Tansy stopped, her father going on ahead. “As far as we know, it’s the last apple orchard in the world. We think it happened during the wars. When it petrified—or metallified, is that a word?—it preserved everything perfectly. And now, here, a few trees have begun to change back.”

  “How? Magic can’t affect iron, can it?”

  Tansy shrugged. “We don’t really know. My dad thinks that the wars were intense enough that even iron was affected. Maybe somewhere on the other side of the planet there’s an iron city that turned into a forest.”

  There were people scattered about the orchard, some of them walking here or there on the ground, but most of them halfway up ladders, heads lost in the clouds of blossoms.

  “What are they doing?” I asked, my voice still breathless with surprise and joy. Not even the revelation that even iron could be turned by magic if it was strong enough could distract me from the beauty of the orchard.

  “Taking care of the trees. Come see,” was Tansy’s reply. She took my hand and led me around the edge of the orchard to find her father, who had taken up work halfway up a ladder.

  “Dad,” she called up. “Can you show Lark what you’re doing?”

  Her father glanced down at us and nodded, before climbing a few rungs down the ladder. A small pouch dangled from his wrist. He dipped a brush into it.

  “No bees, of course,” called Tansy’s father. “So we’ve got to do the hard work ourselves.” He dabbed the brush against one of the bo
bbing sprays of blossoms, and moved along the row so quickly I struggled to follow the movement.

  “Couldn’t you just . . .” I made a gesture with my fingers.

  “Use magic?” Tansy grinned at me. “It’s so much harder to do things with magic than it is to do them by hand. So if we can do something naturally, we do.”

  I gazed around at all the workers. “Did you turn them into real trees again? From the iron ones?”

  Tansy shook her head, furrowing her brow at me. “We can’t magic iron,” she said. “No, they were like this when we found it, just smaller. Every now and then a new tree wakes up from the iron. Dorian believes that the magic is settling from the wars, and that things are beginning to return to normal.”

  I thought of the pockets, the trees with teeth and the ghosts. And yet—perhaps there was truth to the idea. Some of the pockets were barely distinguishable from the outside world.

  “But it must take days just to do a single tree,” I protested. “Why?”

  Tansy gazed up at her father, the little brush flashing in and over the flowers. “Because someone has to. Because the birds do their best but they’re not designed for this. Besides, it’s worth it.”

  She went to the next tree over—this one full of fruit being harvested—and stretched up onto her toes in order to pluck one down and toss it to me.

  I glanced at the apple uncertainly, half-afraid I’d break a tooth on it if it still bore some resemblance to its iron neighbors. It smelled unimaginably delicious, though, and curiosity—and greed—got the better of my caution. I took a single, cautious bite.

  The flavor was delicate and tangy, flooding my mouth as I crunched into it. It was perfectly ripe, and juice dribbled down my chin. There was no electric tang of magic, no metallic bitterness—there was only apple, more delicious than I had ever imagined. The architects had never come up with a way to synthesize apples, not without pollinators.

  Suddenly, the rest of what Tansy had said sunk in. The birds do their best. What birds? I lifted my head, about to call out to Tansy and ask, when a flicker of motion caught my eye.