smugly between Yara and Dylan. They don’t think it’s so funny, and so
Grumble, outnumbered, bows in a mock apology.
“You missed,” I say, putting my dagger and his bow between us. I
wonder how fast he can draw an arrow from his quiver before I raise my
dagger.
“No,” Grumble says. “I hit just where I meant to.”
Dylan tries to form some sort of polite conversation. I need to
get him alone and tell him not to eat the purple apples, but he’s
giddy from something else. “Tristan, Karel and Yara were showing me
some of their weaponry. It’s truly fantastic work.” He holds out a
fighting staff with an intricately etched design. He spins it between
his hands. He bats at the air in front of him, his movements precise
and calculated. When he switches sides, he finds he has an opponent.
One of the warriors is challenging him.
At first Dylan hesitates. But when he sees his opponent’s playful
smile, he relaxes, and they break into a blur of hits that are too
fast for me to follow. As they fight, I feel Yara and Grumble’s eyes
on me, the way my chemistry teacher watches me when I start mixing
things that I’m not supposed to be mixing. Except maybe I’m the
experiment here.
“Impressive toys,” I say.
“We were sent here without weapons,” Grumble says. “But we made
our own to protect ourselves from the beast.”
He hands me a spear. The wood is light but solid with thin vines
carved all over. The spearhead is glass. Sharp. I picture it going
through Archer’s gut.
“When do we start my training?” I say, my knees almost shaking.
“Dylan gets to train.”
Yara nods in Dylan’s direction. “Dylan isn’t training. He’s
flirting.”
“Before, when we lived on the human plane, we supplied weapons to
the court,” Grumble continues. “But they prefer their steel and combat
fire now.”
The blue flame surfaces in my mind, and then I shove it away
before it can consume me the way it did the ship.
“Are you so eager to feel pain, Land Prince?” Grumble says,
walking slightly behind me. I turn because I don’t like anyone at my
back.
“I can handle it.”
He sniffs the air around me. He presses a finger on my chest, and
even though he barely touches me, I can feel a force push me back and
the weeping vines whip the air around us. I step back, back, back
until we are outside the circle of trees. Dylan and Yara and the
others are a distant echo, and there is only Karel pushing me. Why
does he hate me so much? I’m a pretty nice guy. But it’s like a lion
realizing there’s an intruder in his pride.
He shakes his head, dispelling all of my confidence. “You do not
know, Land Prince. You hide behind a mask of strength, but I can see
what you keep underneath. You are cloaked in fear, and that fear will
break your human heart until there is nothing and you are alone in the
dark.”
I stumble back. He gives me one last push, then he’s gone, but his
laughter lingers in the wind. I break into a run.
Rule number five: Don’t piss off Grumble. I mean Karel.
As I run back to the village, I notice the soft change in the
moons. They do move. Not very far, but a purple light falls over the
village, which is as dark as it ever gets down here without being
pitch black.
Leaves crunch hard in front of me and I draw out my dagger. She
chuckles in her translucent form.
“I know you’re there, Yara.”
I turn, but I don’t know if I’m turning the right way because I
can’t see her. Then when I look closely, I see the soft ripple in the
air. She blinks her tiger eyes and then shows the rest of herself.
“Put that away, Land Prince.” She walks ahead of me with her
quiver full of arrows and bow around her arm.
“Do you always walk around here fully loaded?” I jog to keep pace
with her.
She looks at my harness with my dagger in the front and the
scepter in the back. “I hope Karel hasn’t made you change your mind.”
“He’s not that scary.” I shake my head, but I’d be a fool to say
Karel doesn’t rattle me. So I’m going to be the fool and not say it,
just think it. “I have to go through with this, Yara. My people, the
ones here, the ones on the other side, they depend on it.”
She doesn’t say anything for a long time, just walks alongside me
even though I don’t know where I’m going.
“Why aren’t you as angry as Grumble?” I ask. “I mean Karel.”
She stops and watches the sky as the purple darkness deepens
around us. “I was much younger when we came to the Vale of Tears. I’ve
grown up here. It is my home, more than the river I was born in. For
Karel, for many of the older generation, it will always be a place of
banishment.”
I think of Coney Island, the beach, Layla sitting on our lifeguard
tower with the sun in her wavy hair. No matter where I end up, that
will always be my home. The thought of it weighs down on my chest. I
breathe fast, like it’s going out of style.
Something falls from above, right at my feet. I pick up the purple
apple and brush the dirt off the skin. Unlike the weeping trees, this
one holds its branches up, reaching toward the sky. Its leaves are as
dark as the skin of the fruit it gives.
“The goddess tree,” Yara says. “The only one we’ve found in the
Vale.”
I hold it out to Yara.
She shakes her head, but I see her body stiffen. “Too sweet for my
taste. The kids gobble it up.”
I hold it closer to me to see if she’ll stop me from eating it.
“It’s time to eat,” she says, pressing her hand on mine until I
lower the fruit from my lips. “You’ll spoil your appetite.”
I throw the fruit behind me.
We pass the tent where I’m staying on the outside of the village
square, and I’m feeling a little bit better because at least I can
trust Yara. There’s a massive fire pit that looks like it gets regular
use, and people are surfacing from the river, from tents, hopping out
of trees to gather around for dinner. Off to the side there’s a wooden
dais that looks like it’s hardly ever been used.
“This is the town square. We have dinner collectively every
night.”
“Is that like a family tradition?”
She shakes her head. “To make sure we’re all accounted for.”
I follow her as she walks past the tent they shoved me into when I
first got here. “The tent of the elders. Isi is our leader. Karel and
I are in charge of training our children. The Tree Mother is-”
“The oracle,” I offer. She doesn’t deny it, but she also doesn’t
confirm what I’ve said.
“You don’t look so old,” I joke. “I mean, to be an elder.”
“You should know better than anyone else how deceptive our
exterior is.”
We walk in silence for a bit, passing eyes that follow us with
unabashed curiosity.
“I feel like I have something on my forehead.”
She licks her finger and rubs it between my eyebrows. “It’s gone
now.”
“That’s gross.”
“You asked,” Yara says. “We haven’t had a court visitor in-ages.
You have to understand that to us, there isn’t a world outside here.
There’s the outer ring where the beast lives. Then the inner ring,
where we live. This is it.”
Suddenly the warriors start marching past us. They form a circle
around the border of the village where the tree lines start.
I’m about to unsheathe my dagger, but Yara places a hand over
mine. “It’s okay. It’s just our guard.”
“Does this happen often?”