“You get to the root of Liza's shadow, then, before it touches any more of our children.” I watched Caleb slowly retreat. My cheeks burned.
“We will not rush this,” Karin said to me. She settled cross-legged onto the grass beside me. “Magic has its own rhythms and cannot be forced. Caleb should have remembered that.”
My heart pounded, as if any moment I might need to run. Raindrops trickled down my neck. I shivered and looked up at Karin. With her braid pulled back from her smooth face she looked far too young to have fought in the War.
“If you wish to tell me what you saw, I will listen,” Karin said. “Visions hold less power when put into words. But I won't make you speak. And you need not tell anything you don't want to.”
Trees, fire, shadow—I feared speaking would give my visions more power, not less. “I can leave,” I told Karin. “If the shadow is bound to me, I can draw it away.”
“You'll go nowhere,” Karin said. “Not at my urging. Whatever threatens you, if we can have it out, we can deal with it. There's no magic so terrible it cannot be laid to rest.”
The light rain stopped. Wind blew against my damp skin. “Ask Caleb. He saw everything. He was there.”
“I'm asking you. They're your visions. Only yours. Please trust me, Liza. Not for my sake, not for Caleb's, but for your own.”
Father said strangers couldn't be trusted, that trust was a child's tale swept away by the War.
“You called me,” Karin said. “When the trees attacked. You called, and I came. I don't know why, but put some trust in that, if in nothing else.”
The moon slipped deeper into cloud, turning Karin's face to shadow—all but her eyes, which remained bright as she watched me. I took a deep breath, like when I dove beneath the surface of the river. “I saw my mother,” I said.
Karin nodded, waiting. My voice grew low as the wind. “Mom told me she'd been a fool. She asked me to forgive her, for what I don't know. She told me—but she's dead. No one ventures out alone into the night and lives.”
“You did,” Karin said.
“I wasn't alone.” Without Matthew I would have drowned in the river or been devoured by the dogs. And Karin had saved us from the trees.
“Perhaps your mother found help, too.”
I shook my head. “She was alone.”
Forgive me, Lizzy. She was gone beyond anyone's forgiveness. Yet I heard myself ask, “Can visions be trusted?”
“Trusted how?”
“Are they real? Are they true? Can magic be trusted?”
“Magic can never be trusted,” Karin said. “Just ask Jared, who burned his fingers more than once this evening as he learned to control his light. But as for whether you see truly—that I cannot say. Even Before visions were never simple. They're often tied up with other magic. What of the other children in your town? Do any of them have visions, and are those visions true?”
“The others have no magic,” I told her, just as I'd told Samuel.
I couldn't tell whether she believed me or not. She laced her fingers together, rested her chin on them, and asked, “Could you tell where your mother was in your visions? That might help.”
Did I dare to hope? Hope has no place after the War,
Mom had said. Yet I so wanted to believe she lived. “She was in a place of—of ash and dead trees.” I should have found the memory of those blackened trunks comforting, but it only brought an acrid taste to the back of my throat. Crops wouldn't grow in so dead a place. People would die there, too. “What could kill so many trees?”
“Pray you never have to know,” Karin said. “Tell me what else you saw.”
I told her in bits and pieces, fragments that couldn't have made any sense. I told her what I'd seen, in this vision and in the others. A metal arch, bright as a mirror. A young woman and my mother, both stepping through the surface of that arch. Grasping trees whose shadows brought tall buildings down.
Tallow trotted to my side, a feather dangling from her mouth. I petted the cat as I continued to talk.
“Why Caleb?” I asked Karin. Caleb had been in my visions before. I dug my fingers into the damp dirt. Even the memory of how he'd invaded my thoughts made me want to crawl out of my skin.
“Time and space are fluid in visions,” Karin said, but for a moment she looked very troubled indeed.
I spoke on, telling how I'd reached through Caleb's mirror and felt the wind of a dead land against my skin.
The only thing I didn't share were my visions of Father. That shame belonged to—ought to have belonged to— no one but me.
At last I fell silent. A weed curled around the toe of Karin's boot, and she absently nudged it away.
“Are my visions true?” I asked again. I felt strange and calm, not how I expected to feel after speaking those visions aloud.
“I don't know.”
“Might they be true?”
“They might.”
And my mother might be alive. My hands clenched. “I have to find her.” I couldn't do anything else, not while there might still be a chance.
Karin slowly unlaced her fingers and set her hands in her lap. “If your visions speak true, it sounds as if your mother is beyond the Arch.”
How could anything exist beyond the surface of a mirror? I remembered how my hand had moved through Caleb's smaller mirror, though. “Beyond the Arch—you mean in the land of dead trees?”
Karin's gaze drew inward, as if she saw something I couldn't. “That would be Faerie,” she said.
A few cold raindrops slid beneath my sweater. Why would even faerie folk live in such a place? It was living trees they'd called against us, after all. “I have to go there,” I said, even as I wondered what chance I could possibly stand against faerie folk. Yet the land had been empty in my visions. Perhaps the faerie folk didn't live there anymore, either.
“I'll train you first,” Karin said. “You'll need all the magic you have to survive beyond the Wall—and in Faerie.”
I shook my head as I remembered the dogs and the mulberry trees and a night Matthew and I almost hadn't survived. So much time, Mom had said, but I had a feeling there was hardly any time at all. Something was wrong—I knew that now as surely as I had known it in my vision. Something was wrong, and it already might be too late to set things right. “I need to go now.”
Karin frowned and reached for the Wall, as if touching wild things helped her think better. Ivy curled like a bracelet around her wrist, and a few stray shoots wove themselves into her sleeve. “I would go with you, but I must stay here to maintain the Wall. Caleb will go, if you ask.”
“No!” The thought of traveling with Caleb after all he'd seen, after all he'd forced me to see…“No.”
“Wait until Matthew is healed, then.”
I hesitated. Matthew and I had gotten this far together, and the thought of his company was more comforting than I expected. But I remembered his ragged breathing and his pale, bruised skin. I couldn't put him in danger again. I shook my head once more. “He'll be safe here.” Karin could train him if she wanted, once he was well.
“You don't want to take this journey alone, Liza.”
I said nothing. Drizzle started up again. The ivy drew back from Karin's skin and stretched toward the rain. Other vines and briars did the same, until the whole Wall reached for the sky.
Karin frowned. “It is possible,” she said slowly, “that the way through the Arch was left open after the War. In that case once you reach it you need only to step through. But otherwise, if the way isn't open—then, Liza, you'll have to rely on your own magic. Your visions have power enough to let you through the Arch, just as they let your hand through Caleb's mirror. But if you fail, you could wander in visions forever. I'd rather you let me teach you.”