The Orphan Army (26 page)

Y
ou know the witch?”
gasped Evangelyne, her eyes bugging wide. “How? I mean, you're only a boy. How's that even possible?”

“It's not like I
know
her,” said Milo awkwardly. “We don't hang out. It's just that I sometimes, um,
dream
about her.”

Oakenayl made a low, unpleasant noise. “He's a sorcerer, Evangelyne. You were right the first time. We should bury him in the dirt with an iron spike through his heart.”

“Hey!” yelped Milo. “How about you go and—”

“Enough!” snapped Halflight. “We need to understand this, not fight about it. Oakenayl, behave yourself. And—Milo, is it? You mind your manners as well.”

The two of them shut up, and Milo felt his cheeks burning. The oak boy's wood-grain face seemed to darken as well.

Evangelyne chewed her lip and looked uncertain.

“No, he is not a sorcerer,” said Halflight in her tiny voice. “There is magic around him, though. I can see it, but it is not
in
him.”

“What's that even mean?” asked Milo.

The sprite pointed at him. “If you were a sorcerer, you would glow a different color.”

Milo held his hands up to inspect them. “Glow?”

“You cannot see it,” said Sprite. “And that is even more proof. A sorcerer could see his own aura. No, Oakenayl; no, Evangelyne. This is just an ordinary boy, a child of the sun.”

“That's what
she
calls me,” insisted Milo. “That's what the Witch of the World calls me in my dreams.”

Everyone looked at Milo, each of them reevaluating him. Oakenayl still wore his hostility like a cloak, though. It hung from him like Spanish moss.

Mook broke the silence to say, with no uncertainty, “Mook.”

Halflight nodded as if that made sense, which to Milo it did not.

“You see magic around him, Halflight?” asked Evangelyne.

“Oh yes,” the sprite assured her. She hopped onto her hummingbird and flitted around in front of Milo. “It is all around him.”

“How?” asked Milo. “How could I have anything like that on my whatchamacallit?”

“‘Aura,'” supplied Halflight.

“Right. Aura. How?”

Halflight looked at Oakenayl, who stared at Evangelyne.

“The witch,” they said at the same time.

Milo looked at each of them and said, “Huh?”

Evangelyne was nodding to herself. “The witch you dreamed about was no fantasy.”

“Yeah, I pretty much figured that,” said Milo, who was no longer as surprised as he would have been a few hours ago. “What is she, though? Some kind of telepath or something?”

“No,” snorted Oakenayl. “Telepaths require a physical body.”

“What?”

“The Witch of the World was never alive,” said Half­light. “She is not even a person. Not the way you are. Not even the way we are. She exists within the shadows; she drifts in thoughts and comes to us in dreams.”

“Is she a ghost?”

The orphans exchanged another few moments of silent looks. Finally Evangelyne shrugged. “We . . . don't actually know what she is.”

“Well, great,” said Milo. “That's a big help.”

“It is what it is,” said Oakenayl.

“Mook,” agreed Mook.

“No,” said Milo loudly, “stop all that. You guys keep talking crazy stuff. It's not fair. Tell me what is going on.”

“He is right,” said Halflight after a moment. “We have the advantage over him, and we are being unkind. This must all be a little strange to him.”

“A little strange? Really?” said Milo. “You think ‘a little' covers it?”

“Okay,” said Evangelyne, holding up a hand. “You're right, Halflight. This isn't fair. Boy . . .”

“Milo,” he corrected.

“
Milo
, we'll explain what we can, but we don't have much time.”

“Sure, but if you'd just come out and said it before, we'd have had time for the long version and a nap.”

It took a moment, but a small smile bloomed on her lips. “You're a weird boy.”

“You're a werewolf,” replied Milo. “You outweird me by miles.”

There was a creaking sound from Mook that might have been a laugh. He said, “Mook.”

“Maybe. But the world is always stranger than even we think it is.” She took a breath and began her story. “This world is old, Milo. Very old. Our people were here first. We call ourselves the Nightsiders. Not because we can't come out during the day—we can—but we like the darkness. We like shadows.”

“Mook,” agreed the stone boy, nodding.

“Our world is bigger, too. Bigger than the things you can see and touch.”

Halflight murmured, “There are worlds within worlds within worlds.”

Evangelyne nodded. “Life among the ­Nightsiders takes a lot of different forms. I'm a lycanthrope—a werewolf—­but there are other shape-shifters. Were-­tigers and were-foxes and were-just-about-anything-you-can-name. There are the realms of faerie and there are as many kinds of sidhe as there are stars in the sky. There are cave trolls and bridge trolls and rock spirits like Mook.”

“Mook.”

“And natural spirits, like Oakenayl, who is a wood spirit.”

Oakenayl said nothing, but he did summon enough manners to give a tiny bow of acknowledgment.

“There are the monsters you've probably read about in books,” continued Evangelyne. “Vampires and ghosts and demons. There are imps and redcaps and will-o'-the-wisps and sprites like dear Halflight.”

“Dragons?” asked Milo hopefully. “Are there dragons?”

Evangelyne looked at him like he was crazy. “Dragons? Dragons aren't real. Don't be silly.”

He said, “Oh.”

“Our ancestors learned how to move between those worlds. Not just between different versions of Earth, but into stranger places. There are kingdoms in the morning mist. There are the realms of faerie and the ghost worlds. There are worlds that hide at the bottom of wells and inside thoughts and behind doorways in dreams. I know that must sound like mystical nonsense to you, but it is the world as we have always known it. It's what's real to us. Do you understand?”

Milo nodded. “Kind of,” he said.

“Some of us learned to move between those worlds,” continued the wolf girl, “and for a long, long time our world was the infinite lands of darkness. Our greatest sorcerers and witches, the elves and faerie folk, built doorways that connected the many realms.”

All Milo could say was, “Wow.”

“The world you know came later. Your cities and nations sprang up so fast, though, and you grew in such numbers that soon this world”—and here she tapped the hard reality of the table—“became crowded.”

“Too crowded to share,” said Oakenayl bitterly.

“Why?” asked Milo.

“Because your kind don't
want
to share it,” replied the oak boy. “You never did. As soon as you discovered fire, you began to burn us. When you forged iron and bronze and steel, you cut us down. When you invented guns, you hunted us.”

“That's not—” began Milo, but he couldn't finish his protest because he knew that there was some truth in this. He'd read books about the witch trials and vampire hunters; about silver bullets and stakes and garlic.

Evangelyne nodded. “Because we're who we are, your kind thought we were evil. To us the word ‘monster' means the same as ‘different' or ‘individual.' To you it stands for something to fear. Something to hate. Something evil.”

Milo could not meet her eyes. This was hard to take.

“Be fair, Evangelyne,” cautioned Halflight. “The people of the sun did not invent evil.”

“No, but they treated us as if we were evil. They were evil
to
us.” Evangelyne paused, head tilted as if listening to her own words. “But you're right. I'm not being fair. Evil isn't something that belongs to one species. There are evil ones among us too. Killers and haters.”

“They started this war,” growled Oakenayl. “They began hunting us long before we turned to hunt them.” He made a fist that was all knots of wood, and as he clenched it, the wood squealed like a voice screaming. “You even cut down the living trees to make your spears and stakes. You built pyres from young trees to burn us.”

Milo felt his face grow hot. He wanted to say that it was all lies, that it wasn't how things were, but Milo could not sit here with these creatures and lie. He could not.

“I . . . I'm sorry,” he said, his voice thick with emotion, his heart heavy with shame and grief.

“Sorry?” began Oakenayl as if he was offended by the word. Instead Evangelyne touched his shoulder and he fell silent.

“This is what your people have done, Milo,” she said. “We are not saying that
you
have done it.”

“No,” Milo said, “but none of ‘my people' are here. No one else is going to say it, so maybe I should. I'm sorry. All of that was wrong. We shouldn't have done it. It was bad. It was . . . evil.”

Halflight came to his defense with a smile and a shake of her fiery hair. “Not all of it was done out of malice, Milo. Much of it was done from fear. Your kind hate what you fear, and you attack what you hate. It's a mark of the people of the sun. Maybe that's how you survived those days when you huddled in caves and were hunted by tigers and bears. Maybe hate is your weapon. It seems to be.”

Milo put his face in his palms. “That's the worst thing anyone's ever said to me.”

A sob broke in his chest.

They waited in silence.

Finally, little Halflight spoke. “He weeps for us.”

No one spoke.

“Has any of them ever wept for us before?” she asked the others.

Still no one spoke. After a moment, someone placed a finger under Milo's chin and raised his head. At first he thought it was Evangelyne. It wasn't. Nor was it Mook.

Instead Oakenayl looked him in the eye. He looked at the tears on Milo's face, and there was conflict in his eyes. Though Milo found it hard to read the expression of a face whose skin was bark and wood grain, he thought he saw regret there.

“Not in my lifetime,” he said. “Not one tear.”

M
ilo sniffed and wiped his eyes.

“I lost people I care about too,” he said. “My dad a couple of years ago. My friends today. Shark and Lizabeth and Barnaby. Bunch of others. I can't even process it yet.”

Halflight flitted near him and sniffed at the wet places on his cheeks. “Tell him the rest, Evangelyne.”

“Sure. Waste more time talking. Then we need to
stop
talking and
do
something,” said Oakenayl, slapping a woody palm down on the table.

“Mook!”

“Hush, then, and let me speak.” Evangelyne took a breath. “Because your kind wanted us to be monsters, Milo, that's what we became. Feral and strange. Vicious, at times. As you hunted us, some of us hunted you. It became very bad, and it stayed bad for a long time. Over time, as Oakenayl said, we turned and began to hunt you. We were very good at it too. Some of us became as bad, as vicious, as you humans. They became so frightening that now they are all that you know of. Because of them, we became the reason your people are afraid of the dark. They are the reason you fear the shadows. They are the things that go bump in the night.”

Milo felt the room grow quiet and cold around him. It wasn't fear. Or, it wasn't
only
fear. The room was actually colder. As the strange girl spoke, her breath plumed between them as if each separate word revealed a ghost. Milo kept waiting—wishing, hoping—that she would burst out laughing the way Barnaby had done. The way Shark would after a practical joke ran its course. The moment stretched. It became excruciating as he sat there waiting for none of this to be true. There were already enough monsters in the world. The dark was already dark enough.

“Are you afraid of us now?” she asked calmly. The candlelight constantly shifted the shadows on her face, changing her expression, giving her a hundred different faces, none of them truly human.

“Yes,” Milo managed to say. “Of course I'm afraid. I'm so scared I want to run and hide. Is that what you want? Are you happy now?”

Her icy gaze held for a moment longer; then she looked away. “There used to be whole villages of werewolves. Castles filled with vampires. Forests where elves and sprites and faeries lived. Caves where trolls and ogres made their homes. But even before the Swarm came, those villages had become only memories. The castles are in ruins; the graveyards are filled with silent bones; the caves belong to bats; and nothing but fish swim in the lakes. Except for those who escaped to other worlds and the few left here, the rest are gone. The world has fewer shadows in it than it had before. Do you understand?”

Milo said that he did, but asked, “Why didn't you escape?”