Bones of Faerie03 - Faerie After (9 page)

“I’ll be all right,” Allie said softly. “Trust me.”

It was Nys I didn’t trust, but angering him might lose us a chance at escape later. “There’s no need to bind me. I won’t try to stop you.”

“You cannot stop us. Remember that.” Nys touched the wall. Stone melted away, a tunnel appeared, and Nys and Allie walked into it. I focused on my breathing once more as I forced myself not to follow them, watching as the tunnel disappeared, taking Nys’s light with it and leaving me in the dark.

I slept, not because sleeping was safe, but because if I didn’t, I would lose my edge, like a dulled blade.

When I woke, Tolven stared silently down at me, a
glowing stone in his cupped hands. His silver eyes were wild, his breath ragged. I scrambled to my feet, forcing the sleep from my thoughts as I crouched into a defensive stance. How long had he stood there? His muscles tensed, as if preparing to attack—or struggling not to. I held my hands up, a sign that I wouldn’t attack if he didn’t.

Tolven’s breathing steadied, and one side of his mouth quirked into what might have been a smile. “I will not hurt you.” His nails were clipped short now, but his hands tugged restlessly at his sleeves. “I will only listen. The green you carry is not so troubling, once one stops trying to fight it. That is difficult, but difficult is not the same as impossible.”

There was a tunnel open behind him. I rocked on my heels, as if to back away, then lunged forward, grabbed the stone from Tolven’s hands, and ran toward it.

A whisper of ice brushed my face. I caught the scent of something musty and old as gray dust trickled to the floor in front of me.

I skittered to a halt. A fist-sized patch of darkness sank like mist through a hole in the ceiling. I felt Tolven’s hand on my shoulder, pulling me back from it.

“Go away!”
I commanded the dark, but it just kept sinking down, down, down. The purple light grew gray and thin as color drained from the room and the air took
on the bleak chill of a rainy winter morning. I smelled the decay of leaf mold, the rot of old meat. The empty food bowl disappeared into the darkness. That darkness sank through the floor and was gone, leaving behind a pile of gray dust where the bowl had been.

“Close.” Tolven released his hold and stepped around me to block the tunnel. “Too close. Do all humans move with more haste than care?”

Color seeped back into the room like dye through wool. It hadn’t been lack of care that had made me seize a chance of escape. “What
was
that?” I eyed Tolven and the tunnel behind him, weighing other means of escape, thinking of how he had pulled me back from the dark.

He could as easily have pushed me into it, had he wanted to. I waited, tense, listening.

Tolven laughed uneasily. His hair was tied back from his face, twisted into a clear tail that fell down his back, making his eyes large and giving his face the openness of a deer on a path, in the heartbeats before it becomes aware of the hunter. “Surely the Realm’s crumbling is of no surprise to humans? You sent the fires that caused it, did you not?” He tilted his head, as if uncertain. His gaze was clear, nothing wild in it now.

“You’re—”

“Sane?” More laughter, gentle laughter that made me think him amused with himself. “I suppose I am,
if anyone in the Realm can be deemed so now. It is the seeds you carry. Once I push past the fear, their voices are louder than the voice of the crumbling, and when I let myself listen to them, I regain my own mind. It is a strange thing, to be in control of my thoughts after so long.” He held out his hand. “Give them to me, please.”

I felt the velvet tug of glamour in his words, but it was weaker than Nys’s, a small thing beside the pull of the seeds in my pocket. Could they truly heal a broken mind? The seed Karin had kept hadn’t helped her.

“You are human,” Tolven said, “yet my words do not touch you. Why?”

I dared not tell him the seeds were all that protected me from losing my mind in an entirely different way than he had, losing it to the force of his words.

“I could try to take them.” Tolven shrugged good-naturedly. “But I am guessing you have other defenses in addition to those against glamour.”

The seeds were my defenses—I didn’t say that, either. Maybe there was a chance here, a chance to get Allie and myself free, not through fighting but through words. Faerie folk took words seriously. “If I shared the seeds with you, would you lead us back aboveground?”

Tolven rubbed his hands over his sleeves. I saw the faint bulge of bandages beneath them. “Above is fire fever, and what little grows there is far more mad than
me. Below is shelter. Below is safety. There is nowhere else, save for the human world, which was so perilous it killed the Lady herself.”

“Below isn’t safe for humans.” I looked from Tolven to the tunnel. It had opened for him, as it wouldn’t for me. “Can you lead us out?” If we could reach the standing stone, perhaps Allie and I could get Karin out of Faerie through the Arch and stop Caleb and Matthew from trying to enter it at the same time.

“I can lead you. All the tunnels open for me. Nys saw to it, after the Uprising. None dare deny me free passage.” Tolven flashed a small, secretive smile. Who was he, that his desires were considered so important? “If I free you and your friend, you will surrender the seeds?”

I chose my words carefully. “If you take Allie and me to the standing stone—the one by the ring of dead trees—I will give you
one
of the seeds. You have my word.”

“Do humans keep their word?” Tolven asked me.

“Humans with magic do.” Then, “I do, and would even without magic.”

“So it is with me as well.” Tolven bent into a respectful bow. “I will risk this thing. I must leave now, but I shall return for you and the other human as I may. Until that time you must stay here, lest you upset Nys and so fall beyond my reach. See to it that you keep your
word. None will treat you well should they learn that you harmed me.”

We just might get out of here after all. I offered Tolven the stone, because Nys would know someone had been here if he saw it. Tolven took it and left the room without another word. The tunnel closed behind him.

The stench of decay lingered in the air, but if any more crumbling approached, it was swallowed by the room’s own dark. I kept to the far side of the room, and I did not sleep again.

I knew Allie’s approach by the light she held. She shuffled down a tunnel—yet another tunnel—and into the room, a wine skin over her shoulder and another bowl of food in her hands. The tunnel closed behind her as she stumbled to my side. I caught her and helped her sit leaning against the wall, carefully steering her away from the dust. Its smell had faded, but I didn’t know how long it would remain dangerous to touch. Allie’s hands trembled as she set the bowl on the floor between us. Her eyes were ringed with dark shadows.

“He promised not to use glamour.” I handed Allie a vegetable from the bowl. If Nys wasn’t bound to keep his word, we had no power over him at all.

“He didn’t use it.” Allie chewed listlessly on the tuber. “I pushed a little too hard, that’s all. I wanted to
prove I would do as I said so that he wouldn’t change his mind and take me over after all.” Her voice was heavy with shadows of its own. “It was much better, with me doing things for myself. Only”—she reached for another vegetable—“I saw two more patients. One I could save, but the other slipped away faster than I could heal him. That happens sometimes. I know it does. It’s not like I haven’t seen people die, but Caleb was always there with me before. I was never alone.” She squeezed her eyes shut.

I couldn’t make that right. I put my arm around her shoulders instead.

“It’s all right. Nys didn’t blame me, so that was good.” Allie opened her eyes. “It’s so sad, the way fire fever makes everything come unraveled deep inside of them.”

I shivered. “Unraveling and crumbling. They’re sort of the same, aren’t they?”

Allie shuddered. “Don’t say that.”

“Is it true?”

“I don’t know,” Allie said. “The squirrel—it was only its body crumbling away, not its … its essence. That’s true for fire fever, too. The man who died … what you would call his shadow, it left him. It didn’t unravel like his body was doing. But that’s also true for all sorts of illnesses that have nothing to do with the crumbling. Don’t scare me.”

“I’m not saying it to scare you.” I was saying it because when Allie healed, she was touching the fire fever as surely as she’d touched the crumbling squirrel. “I’m saying it so you’ll be careful.”

“Of course I’m careful!” Allie bit fiercely into the rest of her tuber. “But of course I’m going to do all I can, and not just because we’re trapped here and I have no choice. Nys doesn’t understand that. It’s so strange that he’s Caleb’s father, isn’t it? I think it’s because of Caleb he decided to trust me a little, but he doesn’t trust you. I don’t know why.”

Perhaps it was because I would still take out his eyes, given the chance. I had little talent for hiding such things. I needed to learn to hide them. “You’re Caleb’s student,” I said. “And I’m Karin’s.”

“I don’t see why—” Allie picked up another tuber, turned it in her hand.

“I think faerie politics are complicated, and I think Caleb and Karin used to be on different sides of them.” I took a vegetable from the bowl, too, doing my best to ignore the slimy way it slid down my throat.

Allie set her tuber back in the bowl, uneaten. “I’m so worried about them. We don’t know if Karin’s even alive, and Caleb—he’ll do anything to get to us.”

“I know.” I rubbed at my shoulder, but I couldn’t
reach all the sore spots on my own. Lowering my voice, I said, “Matthew’s with him.”

“Of course he is. Don’t need visions to see that.” Allie wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m tired, but it doesn’t seem right to sleep when so many people I care about are in so much trouble.”

“If you rest, you’ll be better able to help them.”

“I know that. I do.” Allie sipped from the wine skin. “You need sleep, too, Liza.” She handed me the skin.

I drank as well. “I slept while you were gone. Go ahead.”

“All right.” Allie pillowed her head in my lap, and this time she fell asleep as easily as after a day’s work in the fields. I brushed her hair back from skin clammy with sweat.

I watched for patches of darkness, for any scent of decay, and most of all for Tolven to keep
his
promises.

Tolven didn’t return. I kept watching long after Allie’s light went out, but when I saw new light in the distance at last, it was Nys, come to fetch Allie away once more.

Chapter 7

A
llie woke at that light, and we both stood to face the stone shaper. He ignored us, kneeling instead to examine the pile of gray dust. He tapped his belt, and one of the links took on a liquid brightness. He drew the link free, and it shifted into a sharp stone shard. Nys poked the shard into the dust, removed it, and, finding it whole, pressed it back into his belt, where it became ordinary stone once more. He put his hands to the floor on either side of the dust then, and that stone, too, turned to shining liquid. Sweat trickled down Nys’s face as the liquid rock flowed over the dust, covering it before hardening again.

“That should hold well enough,” Nys said. “And so you see more of the damage the Uprising has wrought. Come, Healer.”

Had the fires my people sent truly caused this crumbling, as surely as they’d caused the unraveling of fire fever? How could any fire hold that much power?

Allie let Nys’s fingers wrap around hers. I wanted to throw up the sickly sweet vegetables I’d eaten. How many times would I watch, powerless, as he took Allie away?

“Take me with you,” I said. Allie shouldn’t have to do this alone—and beyond this room, there might be some chance of escape. Tolven hadn’t come back. It was up to us to find our own way out.

“And why would I do that?” Nys looked coolly down at me. “You’re no healer. You can draw the living to you, but you cannot call back the dead.”

“But she can,” Allie said. “If they haven’t gone too far.”

“Indeed?” Nys tightened his hold on the healer. “That is not a power summoners were known to have, before the Uprising.”