The shadow looked up and shook her head—no.
As a tree she will die, as all trees must in this dying land, and it will not be without pain. The Lady’s words, but Karin had said as much when we’d found the townsfolk changed.
“What do you wait for?” Elin demanded. The butterfly was in her hair once more, but the wings had ceased their flapping at last.
“I wait because I fear calling will kill her.” A loop of ivy hung from one of the oak’s lower branches. Its leaves were already brown, without Karin to keep them awake. One drifted to the ground, and Karin’s shadow shrank a little. I thought of the leaves I’d called from the sleeping maple seed, of how quickly they’d withered and died. I thought of the townsfolk in their trees, dying of winter as well. Winter would kill us all in the end, one way or another.
I turned to the quia tree. The shadow that clung to it seemed sharper, more clear than both Karin’s shadow and the shadows of the townsfolk. It slept more lightly than the other trees, too, as if tossing in troubled dreams. I felt cold magic stretch between us once more. I hadn’t imagined it—this tree knew me. It remembered me.
As I put my hand to the quia’s smooth bark, I felt something more—the sense that this tree’s shadow didn’t end with its roots but reached far deeper, looking to someplace beyond the human world to remember how to grow.
I didn’t know if I’d been right or wrong to plant the quia seed and, in doing so, call winter into this world. I only knew that I had. “This is my responsibility.”
“Liza,” Mom said. “Not everything is your fault.”
“I know that.” The War wasn’t my fault, nor any of the things Mom, Caleb, and Karin had done during it. And maybe spring would still come on its own, just as it had Before, as the trees found the ancient pathways my people said they’d always followed to wake themselves.
But every moment I waited, the chances that there would be enough life left in Karin’s tree to call her out grew fainter. Karin said trees died slowly, but I could see the shadow in her tree shrinking. I could wait on spring no longer.
“I have to call it back,” I said.
Chapter 17
“No one can stop the worlds from winding down.” So much despair in Elin’s voice. She held her hurt arm close. “Grandmother said so, when we came to your world and found it as dead as ours.”
“The Lady doesn’t know everything,” Mom said.
“Careful, human.” Elin’s bleakness was tinged with disdain.
Mom laughed, a wild sound. “I’m through fearing your people, Elianna. None can do worse to me than your grandmother has already done.”
I kept my hand pressed to the quia tree. In the darkness, its shadow seemed more real than its bark and branches.
“Spring has been late before,” Mom said.
Would the other trees follow the quia into spring, as they had followed it into winter? “I don’t know how much time the others have. Would you keep me safe and lose them all?”
Mom didn’t answer that. She didn’t need to. I looked down, ashamed. Wasn’t that what I’d wished of her before this all began? That she could have stayed with me, kept me safe instead of protecting others?
“Do what you need to.” Mom rubbed at the arm I’d bitten. “I don’t know as much about magic as Karinna and Kaylen, but I’ll keep watch as best I can.”
I swallowed hard. “Thanks, Mom.” My breath puffed in front of me. The ground would freeze again soon.
Mom looked at Elin. “Promise you’ll not harm my daughter should she fail.”
Elin laughed bitterly. “Why should I make any promises to humans?”
“Because Liza won’t do this thing unless you do.”
I would do this thing no matter what—but I didn’t say so. I couldn’t lie, but my mother could. “Promise,” I said to Elin, “that you won’t harm me or Mom or anyone from my town.”
Elin stalked to Karin’s tree and leaned her head against it. “I do this for you, not them. I do not understand why you care for these humans so. I will never understand it. I will never understand why you did not take me with you when you went away to fight.” If Karin heard, she gave no sign. She’d drawn her shadow arms around herself, and her head was bowed once more.
Elin turned back to us. She’d been crying again. “You have my word.”
The moon was higher now, but I could still see the pinpricks of stars, like light through old nylon. I rubbed at the leather around my wrist, feeling stone and skin to either side of it. Matthew and Kyle were both out in that darkness. Even now I chose who to save.
I returned my good hand to the quia’s trunk, shivering as my skin touched the tree’s cold shadow. All this long winter I’d been cold. I wasn’t sure I remembered what spring felt like, let alone how to call it.
My dead hand weighed me down. I focused on the quia’s shadow and the restlessness that slept within the tree. “Grow,” I whispered to it. “Seek air, seek sun, seek life!”
The quia’s shadow pulled at me, urging me toward the same uneasy sleep in which it already rested. I pressed my feet firmly into the mud and felt again the way the quia’s shadow stretched beyond its roots, deep into some other place—into Faerie? Did Karin’s world remember the green my world had forgotten? The Lady had said nothing grew there, but perhaps some thin thread of spring remained. “Wake!” I called to the shadow’s roots—to that place beyond its roots. “Grow! Seek air, seek sun, seek light!”
I called again, and again. I couldn’t call my mother to me, nor Matthew, either, not always. I couldn’t call Johnny back, or the others I’d lost, even before this long winter. But I could do this. I could call spring. “Grow!” I saw, somewhere beyond sight, the way the quia’s shadow twisted into a dark rope reaching down out of this world. I saw the thinnest thread of green snaking through the darkness, answering my call. I reached for that thread with my magic, pulling it toward me. “Grow!”
Something pulled back, something gray and dying that also answered my call and chased after the green. I held to that thin thread, but the harder I held on, the harder the grayness pulled me in turn, urging me deep into the earth, beyond the earth.
Light drained from the world around me, moon and stars fading to dead gray coals. This wasn’t Faerie. Even the desolate Realm the War had left behind held more color and life than this.
Yet I’d been here before. I’d called Caleb back from this dead land where nothing grew. I’d thought I’d escaped it and brought him and the quia seed both back with me.
I thought of dead fields and bare trees, of white bone and gray ash. No one could escape such a place, not for good. All things wound down in the end. I was human. I would die. How could I ever have imagined otherwise?
I tried to think of green things, of living things, but green was only a word, and I no longer remembered what it meant. Winter and death pulled on me. I couldn’t fight their wordless call. I closed my eyes and let dead branches wrap around me. I wasn’t cold anymore. It wasn’t such a bad thing after all to see the worlds wind down.
“Quit it, Liza.” A boy’s voice, from somewhere behind me. Something about that voice made me angry. It had always made me angry.
“Go away.” There was no power in my words—in me.
“Nice try.” The boy spoke in front of me now. “Too bad I’m through with the whole disappearing act.”
I knew him, but I couldn’t call up a name. I curled up small among the branches, not caring as thorns dug into my skin.