by Molly Ringle
Madness. Still two more elements to go before she even got to that end.
All taken into account, she completely understood why no one had managed to break this curse in several generations so far. As solutions went, this was complicated, frightening, and nonsensical. Not many people would attempt it, and that was assuming the locals even showed up for them, which she gathered they rarely did. She was lucky; they “liked” her.
The slope climbed, steep again, so that now when her knees slipped she slid backward. She fought on. Barnacle-covered rocks poking through the seaweed served as handholds. She was thankful she’d worn ski gloves, though the barnacles’ sharp edges were cutting dozens of slits in their outer layer. Creatures both fae and ordinary glided past her bubble, but she’d become determined about ignoring them and keeping her eyes on the path.
The slimy green gave way to mud, then to rocks. She switched back to walking, though as soon as she stood, her spine seized up in pain from the prolonged crawling. Wincing, she pressed her hands to her lower back and kept forward, her legs stiff.
Cold poured down over her. She jolted with a gasp, thinking she’d broken her bubble again. But looking up she found sky: dark, cloudy, night sky, welcome and gorgeous. The frigid air washed down around her, smelling of fresh snow, colder than the water by probably twenty degrees.
She sucked it in and let out a long breath. “Oh, thank God.” A few yards up, she dragged her weary feet past the last two glowing sand dollars on the beach and stood on dry land again, shaking. She looked back at the island where she had started. Such an innocent body of water between here and there, a calm little stretch of black. She knew she’d never look at it again without a vivid recollection of its dark depths and the creatures that swam there.
She turned toward the forest, and barely had time to wonder what her next element would be when a lightning bolt zapped a tree with a deafening crack. The force of it smacked through her body. Orange flames erupted in the branches. Though the trees stood at least forty feet from her, she felt the blast of heat. All the snow on the beach melted within seconds. Flames licked the fir, madrone, and cedar trunks, searing them black. The fire spread up the trees and out to both sides, leaving a ribbon of dark air between two patches of inferno.
The fire path.
Livy could hardly breathe. Fear rooted her to the beach.
She’d been near forest fires before, never this close, but close enough to be afraid she wouldn’t get out in time. Part of her job in the dry summer months was to assist with dispatch for wildfire-fighting crews, and sometimes she had to go help flush out citizens in the affected area, or take up a station on a nearby road to keep people from entering. There had been a couple of times when the fire had changed direction unexpectedly and roared toward her, and…she still suffered nightmares from it.
Livy had written papers in college about how wildfires were a normal and necessary part of the forest ecosystem. She got that. But they killed firefighters and trees and animals, and she detested and feared them for it. Now she had to walk through one? It wasn’t just some illusion—or if it was, it was a hell of a convincing illusion, because she could feel the heat, smell the smoke, hear the sap crackling.
The path was safe. She had just crawled beneath the earth and under a hundred feet of water. She could face this. Skye lay on the other side, in the hands of beings about to take her away forever.
Livy told her feet to move, and a moment later they obeyed. She walked forward.
The fire made its own hot wind, blowing her hair back. Steam rose from her clothes, eliciting a fleeting smell of seaweed baking under a summer sun. The stench of smoke obliterated the odor within seconds. Her eyes watered and the back of her throat stung even before she stepped onto the path.
No particular glowing lines defined the path, but it remained unmistakable, a stripe of blackened ground in the midst of a fire that was consuming what looked to be at least an acre. Livy hesitated at its threshold. The path was less than three feet wide, but the flames did seem to be holding back from crossing into it. Her face, her only exposed skin, had already thawed from its damp chill and felt dried out, like she was looking into the open door of a hot oven.
She walked in.
Five steps in and her eyes were streaming from the smoke and heat. Ten steps and she had to tuck her chin down and cover her mouth and nose with her coat collar to keep from coughing. She kept going. The flames roared like a storm, gusting hot wind at her. She caught a whiff of burning hair, and realized the ends of her long ponytail were blowing out of bounds and getting singed off. Choking on a sob, she twisted up her hair and stuffed it down the back of her coat.
If she had stretched out an arm on either side, her fingers would have caught fire. Sparks and tiny airborne embers sometimes flew past, any one of which could set her aflame if it landed on her. Her tear-blurred vision seized upon each one that came near, keeping watch on it.
One of the sparks hovered, rose, stretched into a star-like white ball, and…smiled at her.
Fire fae.
“Hi,” she croaked in greeting, the word muffled in her collar.
It whistled in answer, a sound like a campfire igniting a vein of sap in a fresh log, but the sound did strike her as friendly somehow. As she continued staggering forward, the faery swirled around, staying just ahead of her, and soon three other sparks joined it. They danced in loops, like sparklers being waved by children.
A voice called out, a human cry slicing through the crackling roar of the fire. Livy looked to her left, startled. She gasped, stopped on the path, and kept staring even though her eyes streamed in the smoke.
“Skye?” she cried back.
For there stood Skye, maybe ten feet away, in a dark space between two burning trees, looking at Livy through the flames. Heat made her shimmer and ripple, but the pale face, the dark eyes, the hand lifting to catch Livy’s attention—it was undeniably her.
Skye called out again: “Hurry!”
It couldn’t be her. A fae illusion, a face in the fire, the way you could see if you stared into any burning hearth long enough, but enhanced with magic.
But she looked so real. Livy stood still, staring at her in agony. Skye was out here somewhere. What if she’d escaped the goblins and was trying to find her way back, and had been caught in the fire?
“Hurry,” Skye implored again.
What if by “hurry” she meant “save me”?
Livy sucked in a huge breath and dove off the path, running through flames as fast as she could, hoping with all her courage that the remaining dampness of her clothes would keep her alive for this requisite twenty seconds. Her feet crashed through the burning layer of underbrush and into the mushy moss beneath, but she kept moving until she reached the spot where Skye stood.
The image of Skye broke apart into ripples of smoke and rose into the air.
And Livy realized what a horrible mistake she’d made.
Already coughing and choking, half-blind with smoke-borne tears, she spun and raced back toward the path. Her boot plunged deeper into a patch of fallen twigs, and she tripped. She fell against a burning tree, shielding her face with both arms, but screamed when the fire found its insidious way between her clothes, or burned right through them. Searing pain lashed her forearms and ribs.
She yanked herself away from the trunk, landed on her back, and looked up for a second into the hellscape of orange and red flame curling high up into the canopy. Then she rolled frantically back and forth to put out the fires that had caught on her clothes.
The spark-shaped fae squealed and swirled in the edge of her vision. She guessed they were right over the path, so she rolled toward them, crashing through burning trees, choking, feeling new sizzling pains on her cheek, her legs, her sides.
She tumbled straight into the relative coolness of the path and landed on her back, weeping softly.
“Hurry.” This time it came from one of the squeaking sparks, bobbing around in her face.
>
Had they shown her Skye saying “Hurry” as a way to encourage her onward? Had they meant well? Or had it been mischief, meant to lure her off the path like a will o’ the wisp luring people into the swamp to drown?
No time to ask, and it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t leave the path again.
Though her burns still throbbed—the ones she could see were second-degree—she couldn’t do a thing to treat them right now. She certainly couldn’t go on lying here. So, she got up, and limped onward.
The bright white sparks looped along in front of her, keeping her company.
A minute later she glanced over her shoulder, and blinked in surprise. The forest fire was dying in her wake, though it still blazed ahead of her and around her. Fireweed shot up behind her, green leaf blades unfurling from stalks topped with magenta spikes of flowers. The blossoms bobbed at her like a curtsey, then the plants hopped off the path and vanished in miniature flashes of lightning.
She turned forward again. The heat and smoke and pain still threatened to overcome her, but trusting the path was her only option.
Her trust was rewarded with one more visitation: a scurrying shape on a tree trunk caught her eye, and she looked up to see a foot-long orange salamander clinging to the burning tree; the fire didn’t bother it at all. It unfolded a pair of leathery wings, leaped into the air, and soared away.
Livy watched it vanish into the shimmering heat waves. Did she just see a small dragon?, she wondered, astounded. Then again, why not? Faery creatures apparently came in no end of shapes.
One of the living sparks flew up beside her. “Quick. They have transformed your tribemates.”
Livy sucked in a breath in alarm, and immediately began coughing. “Okay,” she rasped out, and began running down the path.
Sweat dripped down her ribs under her clothes, stinging her burns. Everything on the outside of her clothes was seared dry. The fire continued to rage around her, though another swift glance back proved it was still dying out a few yards behind her. Spark-creatures and other orbs of light zipped about like fireflies.
Finally the path opened into a cool gray-and-white world: the snowy forest, untouched by flame. The last few feet of the path turned out to be glowing red embers—a walk on coals—even though the surrounding trees weren’t on fire here. Livy didn’t slow to think about it. She put on an extra burst of speed and ran straight over the embers. In five seconds she was across, and came to a gasping stop on the snow-dusted forest floor, the soles of her boots smoking slightly.
She bent over, hands on her knees, coughing up sooty phlegm and spitting it out. The firelight faded away. The air turned cold again. Her whole body felt sunburned. She picked up a handful of snow and dabbed it against her face and arms. Where it touched her burns, the pain faded. In surprise, she packed more fresh snow onto the blistering burn between her glove and coat sleeve, where some of the fabric had been singed and warped. When the snow melted away, her skin had been healed, though the fabric was still gone.
“Oh, thank God.” Livy flopped down into the snow and rolled gently from front to back, letting the cold erase the damage.
Magic. How bizarre, how terrible, how fortunate.
She stood back up. Spark-sized creatures glimmered in the air. “Got to say,” she told them, “after earth, water, and fire, air cannot be that bad.”
Then, squinting above, she realized that one of the light-clusters she had taken for glowing fae in the treetops was actually a collection of lightbulbs and lanterns. Music, screeches, and cackles drifted down from it, audible now that the fire’s roar was gone.
A small white shape zoomed up to her and hovered: a hummingbird, an all-white one, a type she had never seen. “The goblins’ lair,” it told her.
“Oh. Wow.”
The lair wasn’t directly overhead; it was still fifty yards deeper into the forest, but now it seemed frighteningly close.
“Wouldn’t they have seen that fire?” Livy said. “Won’t they see me?”
“No. We cloaked it from them, as we have cloaked you. Until you touch their dwellings or their trees, they will not see you. But dawn approaches. You must climb to them. That is your air path.”
“But…” Livy’s gaze stayed locked on the lights of the goblin treehouses. “That’s got to be a hundred feet up. Is there a ladder, or…”
“You must take your path.”
Livy spotted a line of glowing shelf-shaped mushrooms climbing the trunk of a big cedar nearby. She picked through the snowy ferns to the cedar, laid her hand on the bark, and frowned up at the mushrooms. “But the goblins aren’t even in this tree.” There wasn’t a ladder, just lots of small branches someone could, in theory, grab onto and climb.
“If you climb their trees directly, they will sense you. Your path must go through other trees, and thence to their dwellings.”
“What?” Livy swung to stare at the hummingbird. “I have to climb through the canopy? Like, jump from one tree to another, way up there? Without even a safety rope or anything?”
“Your path,” it said again, calmly. “The air fae will guide you.”
“Oh, for the love of God.” Livy ran her gaze up the path, following it until the glow of the mushrooms faded in the dizzying height of the trees. “Okay, I take it back. Air is going to be just as bad.”
She gripped a small branch in each hand, found footholds, and began to climb.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
KIT DIDN’T BOTHER STRUGGLING ANYMORE. HE LAY ON HIS SIDE ON THE MOSSY DECK, NOT EVEN CARING THAT THE dancing, thumping feet of the goblins were rattling the boards against his skull.
Livy hadn’t come. Chances were good she was trapped, hurt, stuck in an enchantment, or even dead. Any number of fates could have befallen her. Goblin scouts could have snuck out and waylaid her. The dangers of the fae path could have ensnared her—some of the other fae sounded nearly as treacherous as the goblins, if legends were true. She could be lying alive but insane, maddened by a spell, never to return to the human world. If she didn’t come back…his heart felt like it was tearing itself through his chest at the thought. He wouldn’t dwell on it, not yet. She might still arrive.
But if she did, she’d be too late. Grady and Skye had changed into goblins; it was done. Soon the tribe would probably throw Kit off this treehouse and let him die slowly in the snow from his injuries and hypothermia. He hardly even cared about that, except then they’d go latch onto some new liaison. One of Grady’s siblings, maybe; another perfectly nice cousin whose life he’d be destroying. He’d rather keep the burden himself than let it fall on anyone else.
If he could go on living after tonight, and if he had Livy, maybe that’d be enough. At least she knew the truth about his messed-up life. If she and he, both of them bereaved, had each other to lean on, maybe they could get through…though really, she might not love him anymore once she’d lost her sister to his family curse. He couldn’t blame her if that was how she felt.
Grady and Skye lay beneath a table, making out, or whatever exactly you’d call that tangle in a pair of goblins. He tried not to look at them. They’d become gargoyles, hideous.
The rest of the tribe had mostly ignored Kit. Now a scratchy hand touched his shoulder, and a small goblin crouched before him. Her necklace dangled into his line of sight: an ancient pocket watch with a flower etched on it.
“Their new forms are not permanent until dawn,” Flowerwatch said. “So if anyone were to interfere before then…the locals, perhaps…they could yet save your friends.” She held his gaze, anxious.
Kit glowered back.
Flowerwatch glanced over her shoulder, then hooked a finger into his fabric gag and tugged it down so he could speak.
He smacked his tongue, shuddered, and glared at her again. “You know I can’t talk to the locals. Lot of good this information does me. Why are you nice to me, anyhow?”
Though her gray-blue eyes were too round and big for her face, they looked more human than most of the goblin
s’. She had only sparse hairs on her head, but the way they curled around her ears to chin length reminded him of a young woman with long bangs. He could almost picture what she used to look like, maybe. “Do you know who I was?” she said.
He softened a little. “Françoise. Or such is the rumor.”
She nodded, lowering her gaze. “Most forget their old lives. But I’ve made a point of remembering.” She clicked a latch at the side of the pocket watch, and it opened. A tiny square of paper fell into her hand, folded and stained and falling apart at the creases. After another fearful glance back at the reveling tribe, she unfolded the paper to show him. Pencil handwriting covered it.
He made out Je m’appelle Françoise Gourcuff before giving up with a sigh. “I don’t really know French.”
She refolded it and tucked it back into the watch. “It says, ‘My name is Françoise Gourcuff. I was enchanted and taken away by the goblins when I was twenty, just before I would have married. I would have been a wife and a mother, and my human life was taken from me. I do not ever want to forget.’ I have kept it all these years. One’s name-token is sacred; no one dares touch it. I read it whenever I can, so that I always remember and never truly become one of them.”
He studied her downcast face. “Has it worked?”
She nodded. “The others assimilate. But I have never completely let myself belong.”
“Shouldn’t you hate me, though? It’s my great-grandma who dragged you into all this.”
“She, not you. Even her I did not hate. She didn’t know what they would do to me.”
“That’s true. I don’t think she would’ve done it if she knew.”
“She told me so once, years ago. I have forgiven her. But I am still here, of course, and am always looking for ways to lessen the cruelties we commit. I’m usually powerless to stop them. If anyone is coming tonight to save your tribemates…” She waited for Kit to confirm it. He didn’t move, still not daring to give anything away. Flowerwatch let her head droop. “I would be glad to see your two friends get away, that’s all. Glad for you, and for them.”