Bones of Faerie03 - Faerie After Read Free Page A

safely.” Karin extended her staff toward the squirrel, and a green tendril snaked into the dust. The color began to drain from it. Karin made a harsh sound, and the tendril fell, half green, half gray, from her staff. The gray half crumbled into more dust. “This one is newer than Matthew’s leaf, I think.”
    Allie backed away from the squirrel. We all did. I thought of the gray leaf caught in Matthew’s fur, and I shivered. I scanned forest and trail but saw nothing that could have caused this.
    Karin turned back to the path. “I suggest we keep walking.”
    A mile on I found a half-crumbled sycamore leaf by the side of the trail. It didn’t affect Karin’s staff when she poked at it, so she moved to the sycamore tree beside it, putting her hands to the furrowed brown bark.“This tree remembers cold. A time when the midday sun wasn’t strong enough to warm its leaves. It would rather not remember.”
    We didn’t speak much after that. Matthew found a pile of gray dust where the sapling he’d seen had been, and we all found more crumbling leaves. Always, Karin poked the dust with her staff before questioning the trees around it. Their answers were no clearer than the sycamore’s.
    “There’s more to this than we can see.” Karin’s staff met a rock, and she stepped around it. “There are hints of it in the air, too, very faint. I’ve been catching some of them as the wind shifts.”
    I didn’t feel any wind. “You said you smelled this after the War. What did it mean? Was there dust then?”
    “With so much burned to ash, who can say?” The ivy vine poked out from beneath Karin’s sleeve, retreated again. “But Faerie was sorely wounded, in ways I do not wholly understand. Every root and branch and stone, every person and every animal, felt that wound, which ran deeper than the burning of the fires the humans sent, felt it and cried out even as they died. No plant or animal speaker could hear those cries and remain sane for long. I’m told the very land cried out, though none but my mother could hear it.” Something wild flashed across Karin’s face and was gone. “That was all some time ago.This may not be the same thing. We must watch, and listen, and not leap to fear too soon.”
    As the sun neared midday, the air grew warm. I rolled up my sleeves, fumbling as I hooked stone fingers—my left hand was frozen halfway into a fist—under the wool to get my right sleeve up. Matthew offered to help, but I shook my head. I’d been practicing this, just as I’d been practicing shooting with bow and arrow, every day. If I was making more progress with my clothing than my hunting, I would nonetheless keep at both until I regained the skill I’d lost.
    We took dried meat from our packs, remaining watchful as we ate on the trail. The boots Matthew had seen were gone to dust, too, save for a silver buckle that shone in the afternoon sun. A common pattern—perhaps it had belonged to one of the traders who’d begun visiting my town, now that we didn’t turn all strangers away.
    Dust and crumbling leaves grew less frequent as the sun slid toward the horizon. A cricket chirped, but it held no danger. Crickets remained one insect that preferred to prey on plants, not people. We took a side trail to loop around my town, because Karin wanted to visit the tree I’d called before we went on to Franklin Falls.
    The hillside where it stood blazed with color in the evening sun. The tree—a quia tree, cinnamon-barked and red-leafed—rose above orange and yellow bramblesof blackberry and sumac. Its leaves were perfectly round, its shadow clearer and sharper than those of the bushes around it. As far as we knew, it was the only quia tree ever to grow outside of Faerie.
    Calling spring to the quia tree had nearly sent me forever into a gray place where only dead shadows lived. I’d feared this crumbling and death might somehow also be tied to the tree, and so my fault—but I felt only green life pulling on me