Bones of Faerie Read Free Page A

The girl who stared back at me seemed a stranger: dark hair falling around her shoulders, dark eyes large in her sun-browned face, leather pants grown short about her ankles. I turned away, embarrassed by my own shy gaze. Yet after only a moment I glanced back, wanting to check what I'd seen, to remember who I was.
    As I looked, the image in the mirror wavered and flowed away in rivulets of light. In the brightness left behind, I saw—
    Myself, not in Kate's home but by the river that morning, my hand poised above a bucket filled with light—
    My mother, hair tied back from her weary face, slipping out into the night—
    A pale-haired young man, clearly touched by magic, walking through a sun-drenched forest. He showed no fear as a hawk flew through the leaves and landed on his outstretched wrist—
    My sister, breathing her first cries while the midwife shook her head—
    A girl walking through the night, her hair trailing in the wind. A girl who, for just a moment, turned, revealing a face like mine, only her hair was streaked pale as glass—
    I tore my gaze from the mirror and threw my hands up to my face. Faerie magic. Cursed magic. Magic showing me the past, showing me things I'd never seen. My hands shook as I pressed them against my eyes. There was no denying now that magic had taken root somewhere inside me, perhaps on the night I'd gone out after Rebecca, perhaps weeks, months, or years before.
    I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see Kate clutching a small jar in one hand. “Liza.” Her soft voice reminded me of the touch of her fingers through my hair.
    Had she seen my pale roots? Had she seen the visions in the mirror? I didn't know. But I did know that Cam's magic had destroyed Kate's family. Would my magic kill, too?
    No, not if I could help it. No one would die from my magic but me. I turned from Kate's pitying gaze and ran.
    “Wait!” Kate stumbled after me, but she was too slow. I fled from my town and the fields I'd known all my life. I fled into the woods and didn't look back.

Chapter 4
    W hen Father taught me to hunt he said, “Never show fear. Animals and plants can sense fear in your every move. They can smell fear with your every breath.”
    I'd asked him whether that was because of the War, but he'd only laughed softly. “No, Liza. That much has always been true. Difference now is that hunter and hunted look much the same. You can never be sure which is which, not until the hunt is through.” Plants hadn't been among the hunters Before, but Father didn't need to say that.
    I didn't feel like much of a hunter: not when I reached the river and followed it at a run, not hours later when Kate's salve had worn off and my throbbing back forcedme to a walk, not now as the sun dipped below the horizon. Tallow trotted along beside me, unafraid. She'd followed as I fled, and though I'd tried to send her home, in truth I was glad of her company. The cat had ridden on my shoulders much of the day, until they'd grown too sore. I'd taught her to ride there years ago, when she was a kitten.
    I kept to the center of the path, barely out of reach of the ragweed along its edges, but it wasn't the ragweed that worried me most. Father had taught me well—I knew I was being followed. My pursuer had been with me the past mile, maybe longer. Ferns and brambles rustled as they shied away from distant footfalls. Ash and redbud and oak whispered softly as those footfalls passed by. And I felt something watching me from within the deepening shadows, felt it with a certainty that made cold sweat trickle down my neck.
    Don't venture out alone into the dark, or the darkness will swallow you whole.
Even when the sun shone, a tree could take a grown man down if it had taste enough for blood. When the sun set, shadows gathered around the trees and around the other plants, too, not always, but often enough. Not just the ordinary shadows that gather everywhere as the sun gets low—these weredarker, with a slow