Faerie Winter (2 page)

Cold shot through my palm and up my arm. Matthew nudged my other hand, and I remembered the glove I held. I pulled it on. Tingling warmth spread through my fingers, until I could move them once more. “Thanks, Matthew.” I pressed my nose to his. Our frosted breaths, human and wolf, mingled in the air.

Matthew made a quiet sound. “Time to go home,” I agreed. We turned from the ferns, back toward the path and the chores that waited in town. I scanned the snow and brush around us, but I didn’t see any more shadows.

At least it was only human shadows we needed to watch for now. Until this winter, the trees had held shadows of their own, and those shadows had attacked anyone desperate enough to venture out at night. The trees’ roots and branches had attacked, too, by day and night both.

But now the trees had dropped their leaves and they slept, and instead human shadows from Before roamed the woods at night, shadows of those who’d died during the War with Faerie. Sometimes those shadows drifted into town, looking for lost loved ones. I still remembered the look on Matthew’s grandmother’s face when the daughter I hadn’t known she’d had appeared at her door. At least she’d let me lay that shadow to rest. Another of
our townsfolk had shivered to death when he wouldn’t let go of the shadow of his first wife, whom he’d lost during the War. After that, Matthew and I had started doing regular patrols, heading out before dawn a couple of times a week.

We could head out before dawn now that the trees no longer sought human flesh and blood. It had been a welcome change not to fear every rustling leaf.

Matthew stopped and sniffed the air. He turned and trotted off the path, deeper into the forest. I followed. My hand moved to the belt cinched around my oversized coat and the knife that hung sheathed there, a habit from years spent tracking game through more wakeful forests.

Matthew stopped by a mound about the same size he was. He nosed at it, let out a low whine, and began digging. The old snow was unevenly packed, as if it had been shaped by human hands. A faded brown dinosaur sat perched atop it, molded of hard pre-War plastic.

Cold got down beneath my coat and scarf, chilled my toes in their wool socks. I helped Matthew dig, knowing well enough what we would find.

Ben had been young, little more than a toddler, with curls that hung frozen over a face made pale by the moonlight. He hadn’t died in the War after all. He’d died no more than a day or two ago, after the last snowfall, and someone had buried him here.

I wanted nothing more to do with dead children. I wanted to flee this place, but we had to know what had happened to him, in case it posed some danger to our town.

Cold stiffened my fingers. The dinosaur toppled into the snow. I kept digging.

W
hoever had buried Ben had closed his eyes before covering him. Last night’s wind had left no tracks, no sign of where that someone might have gone. The nearest towns were all at least a day’s walk away from ours. What had this child been doing here, so far from home?

As Matthew and I dug the snow away, Ben’s cold hand emerged, clenched against his chest as if he still held his toy. His sweater was a mess of charred fibers that crumbled at my touch. Beneath them—I fought not to look away.

Matthew whined. Beneath Ben’s sweater, the flesh was melted, wool fused to blackened skin and frozen blisters. I was glad of the cold, which kept the odor at bay. I was glad I’d not yet eaten. Matthew’s ears drooped, and I put my arms around him, squeezing hard, breathing the
frosty smell of his fur. If there’d been a fire nearby, he should have caught some scent of it. How far had Ben fled after he’d been burned, and why?

I laid him to rest. There was nothing more we could do. I piled snow over Ben once more. Matthew took the toy dinosaur in his teeth and placed it carefully atop the grave. We headed for home as the moon slipped below the horizon and a faint band of gray lit the eastern sky.

In the distance, an owl hooted sleepily. An owl’s talons could tear a person open easily enough—but when I heard the sound again, it was farther off. The deer and rabbits and mice were going hungry with the trees asleep, and that meant the owls and hawks and wild dogs were hungry, too. When they attacked, they were harder to scare off, but there’d been fewer of them as winter had worn on. We’d have been suffering more from the lack of game in town, too, if not for the emergency provisions we’d been able to lay in the past few years.

Pale yellow light smudged the horizon by the time Matthew and I reached the fields outside our town, Franklin Falls. A brown ragweed vine swung sleepily back and forth across our path. I cut the thing free and flung it into the forest. It could do little harm now, but when spring came, such vines would once again seek our blood.

If
spring came. My gaze strayed to the fields beside
the path. They were white with new snow, only a few dead grasses poking through. The shivering green leaves of winter potatoes and turnips and beets should have long since broken the frozen soil, but this year they hadn’t grown at all. My hand moved to Matthew’s back, and he edged closer to me. We relied on those root vegetables to help us through the spring while we waited for corn and beans and squash to grow.

The adults said that these dead fields had been normal Before, that there’d been no winter crops and spring had always come just the same. Yet even they’d grown uneasy when the pines and firs had gone brown and dropped their needles. Why trees dropping needles should be more unsettling than trees dropping leaves, I didn’t know, but after that, the Council agreed that we should go on short rations until the spring crops came in—just to be safe, they said.

“What if it’s all my fault?” I asked Matthew as my boots and his paws left prints in the snow behind us. Last week patches of brown earth had shown through, but two days ago new snow had covered them again.

Matthew gave my knee a sharp nudge. We’d had this discussion before: Matthew insisted that I wasn’t to blame, that there was no way I could have known what would happen, and that spring would likely still come.

I thought of a hillside thick with blackberry and
sumac, all dead now; of the cinnamon-barked quia tree that stood among the brambles. I’d called that faerie tree into the human world, though only a few people knew it. Magic flowed in two directions; the same power that allowed me to command shadows to rest allowed me to command—to
call
—seeds to grow. But the quia seed had come from a dead land beyond both my world and Faerie, and now I feared I’d called death into my world as well.

I hadn’t thought so at first. I’d laughed with the others to see the leaves burst into fiery colors and fall from the trees, and thought only of how much easier winter would be if the trees slept and we could walk through the forest unafraid. That had been nearly a half year ago, though. The leaves had since turned to brown, and the world their falling had left behind reminded me of the black-and-white photos in the oldest books from Before. It reminded me of the land where I’d found the quia seed. I hadn’t known that any world could be so gray.

I’d tried calling the winter crops as I’d called the seed. They hadn’t listened. I’d tried to call acorns and maple seeds, remembering how I’d once sensed the green at the heart of all seeds yearning to grow. I’d felt nothing but a shadowy gray silence. I’d had no better luck calling leaves from the bare branches of the quia tree itself. The days
were as long as the nights now, and winter still hadn’t released its hold on the land. I could fight a willow’s strangling roots, or a hawk’s poisoned talons, but I didn’t know how to fight a world that didn’t want to grow.

We left the fields behind, walking past the ruins of splintered houses half-buried in tangles of dead ragweed and wild grape. At the edge of the ruins, a once-abandoned house awaited painting. Beyond it we came to the row of whitewashed homes that was our town. As Matthew and I followed the path alongside them, I saw Jayce—the town blacksmith—walking toward us, limping from his old hunting injury. As he waved, I pulled my fur hat more firmly down over my ears and made sure my hair was tucked into my collar. My magic was no longer a secret—nor was anyone else’s—but the clear streaks in my hair were more reminder of it than most folks were comfortable with.

“Liza.” Jayce’s hand gripped his cane, his skin scarred from years spent working in the forge. His gaze flicked to the wolf at my side. “Matthew.” Matthew’s walking through town as a wolf was more reminder of magic than many were comfortable with, too, but Matthew didn’t try to hide, not since the meeting at which we’d told the town that all its children either had magic or one day would. That meeting had gone better than I’d feared: only two adults had drawn their knives, and while one
of the children had caused earth tremors with his magic, he’d stopped them before it became clear he was the cause. Until then, our town had cast out all magic for fear of the harm it could do—of the harm it had done, during the War. Once the townsfolk learned that every child born after the War was touched by magic, however, they had little choice. They couldn’t cast us
all
out, though there were those who wanted to try. Jayce wasn’t one of them. He’d had enough of dead children, too.

“Find anything out there?” The blacksmith’s gaze remained on me, not Matthew.

“A boy.” I rubbed Matthew’s ears. “Young, no more than three.”

“And you took care of him?”

I stared at the condensation frozen in Jayce’s bushy beard and brows. “Not just a shadow. We found a body as well.” I told him all that we’d seen. Sun lit the thin streaks of high clouds. If the cold didn’t break, in a day or two there’d be more snow.

The blacksmith ran a hand over his bald head, which bore more scars. “Council meets tonight. I’ll tell them. If there’s time, maybe we can send someone to bury him—only once the snow melts, we’ll all need to be out planting.” If he feared that the spring crops wouldn’t grow, he gave no sign. Adults believed, somewhere deep inside,
that spring would come, for all that they were careful of our rations. Some part of them couldn’t imagine that green wouldn’t return to the world, as if green was something we were born to. I did not understand it. Deep inside
I
felt as if this gray had surely gone on forever and the forests I’d fought all my life had been merely illusions.

Jayce blew a puff of frost into the air. “It can’t be an easy thing, walking with ghosts. You’re a good girl, Liza. I always told your father so. I think he’d be proud of you, if only …” He shook his head. Surely he knew that Father wouldn’t be proud of me if he saw me using my magic so openly, no matter that I used it to protect my town. Father would have killed me for that magic if he could have, just as he’d killed my baby sister, even though I was too old simply to be left out on a hillside to die. He’d have drawn his knife across my throat, only I’d used my magic to send him away instead.

“Take care Liza, all right?” Jayce hesitated, then looked at the wolf. “You too, Matthew.” He continued down the path toward his forge, and Matthew and I continued to my house.

I heard voices out back. We walked around to find Mom and Hope crouched in the snow.

“Gently,” Mom said. “A breath of wind, nothing more.”

Hope closed her eyes and held out her bare hands. A breeze rippled over the snow, catching the thin blond braids that fringed her face. Tiny acorns clattered at the braids’ ends. A foolish risk, some said. I knew I wasn’t willing to trust an acorn enough to wear it so close to my face, winter or no winter. But ever since Hope and her new husband had moved into their own home, she seemed to have given up on caring what others thought.

The white snow in front of her drifted upward. Hope grinned, a mischievous look that made it hard to believe she was older than Matthew and me. At nearly eighteen she was the oldest person in our town with magic.

“Control,” Mom whispered. I tried not to focus on how loosely her down-filled coat hung about her shoulders, or the way the shadows around her eyes gave her face a sunken look that hadn’t been there last summer.

Hope’s breeze gusted, blowing cold white powder into all of our faces. I coughed; Matthew shook snow from his fur. Hope laughed, brushed the snow from her jacket, and got to her feet. “This is gonna be hell once the baby starts kicking.” Her hands moved to her belly, though there was little sign yet that she was pregnant.

Mom smiled. Did anyone else see the tiredness behind it? “That’s why you need to work on control now. Practice whenever you can.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Hope said, but there was no seriousness in it. She ruffled Matthew’s fur. “You two getting into any trouble?”

Matthew barked. My face flushed.

“And why not?” Hope pulled on her gloves.

Before I could answer, Matthew shrugged his wolf’s shoulders. Hope laughed again. “See you all later. I’ll practice, Tara, I promise.” She gave Mom a quick hug and headed home with a final wave.

Mom hugged me, too, more tightly, as if determined to keep me close. I hugged her back, feeling her bony shoulder blades through her coat. She headed inside, and Matthew and I followed, through the back door and into the cold kitchen, where Matthew’s clothes lay scattered on the floor. He hung behind as Mom and I continued into the living room.