Faerie Winter

enough. The oak sighed, but it didn’t try again. The trees were too tired to do much harm this winter.

I walked carefully over a line of fire ants melting a trail through the snow. Nearby I heard the clicking of termites chewing dead wood. Termites were among the few creatures who hadn’t gone hungry since the leaves had fallen from the trees.

Beneath a pine that had dropped all its needles, a patch of ice-frosted ferns shivered. Something dark moved among the ferns—Matthew’s ears stiffened into alertness. I slowed my steps and rested my hand against his back. We walked forward together.

A shadow hunkered amid the ferns, shapeless and trembling. As I knelt before it, the shadow took on a human shape, arms and legs and face, features smudged and indistinct in the moonlight. A child. In one hand it held out a toy, shaped like a dinosaur from Before—long Before.

I removed my glove and took the child’s other hand in my own. Shadow fingers passed right through mine, and cold shivered through me. I reached out with my magic, and that magic was cold, too. Cold bound us one to another, shadow and living, strong as twisted rope. Softly I asked, “What is your name?”

Something deep within the shadow yearned toward me, aching to be called back to life. “Ben.” His hoarse voice was at the edge of hearing.

I couldn’t call any shadow back to life. “Seek sleep, Ben.” I put my magic—my power—into the words. “Seek rest, seek darkness, seek peace.”

Icy numbness spread through my fingers. Ben whimpered as he sank into the ferns and the snow. His fingers slipped from mine. “Ethan,” he whispered, and then he was gone, leaving behind only a moon-bright whiteness that stung my eyes.

Cold shot through my palm and up my arm. Matthew nudged my other hand, and I remembered the glove I held. I pulled it on. Tingling warmth spread through my fingers, until I could move them once more. “Thanks, Matthew.” I pressed my nose to his. Our frosted breaths, human and wolf, mingled in the air.

Matthew made a quiet sound. “Time to go home,” I agreed. We turned from the ferns, back toward the path and the chores that waited in town. I scanned the snow and brush around us, but I didn’t see any more shadows.

At least it was only human shadows we needed to watch for now. Until this winter, the trees had held shadows of their own, and those shadows had attacked anyone desperate enough to venture out at night. The trees’ roots and branches had attacked, too, by day and night both.

But now the trees had dropped their leaves and they slept, and instead human shadows from Before roamed the woods at night, shadows of those who’d died during the War with Faerie. Sometimes those shadows drifted into town, looking for lost loved ones. I still remembered the look on Matthew’s grandmother’s face when the daughter I hadn’t known she’d had appeared at her door. At least she’d let me lay that shadow to rest. Another of our townsfolk had shivered to death when he wouldn’t let go of the shadow of his first wife, whom he’d lost during the War. After that, Matthew and I had started doing regular patrols, heading out before dawn a couple of times a week.

We could head out before dawn now that the trees no longer sought human flesh and blood. It had been a welcome change not to fear every rustling leaf.

Matthew stopped and sniffed the air. He turned and trotted off the path, deeper into the forest. I followed. My hand moved to the belt cinched around my oversized coat and the knife that hung sheathed there, a habit from years spent tracking game through more wakeful forests.

Matthew stopped by a mound about the same size he was. He nosed at it, let out a low whine, and began digging. The old snow was unevenly packed, as if it had been shaped by human hands. A faded brown dinosaur sat perched atop it, molded of hard pre-War plastic.

Cold got down beneath my coat and scarf, chilled my toes in their wool socks. I helped Matthew dig, knowing well enough what we would find.

Ben had been young, little more than a toddler, with curls that hung frozen over a face made pale by the moonlight. He hadn’t died in the War after all. He’d died no more than a day or two ago, after the last snowfall, and someone had buried him here.

I wanted nothing more to do with dead children. I wanted to flee this place, but we had to know what had happened to him, in case it posed some danger to our town.

Cold stiffened my fingers. The dinosaur toppled into the snow. I kept digging.

Chapter 2

Whoever had buried Ben had closed his eyes before covering him. Last night’s wind had left no tracks, no sign of where that someone might have gone. The nearest towns were all at least a day’s walk away from ours. What had this child been doing here, so far from home?

As Matthew and I dug the snow away, Ben’s cold hand emerged, clenched against his chest as if he still held his toy. His sweater was a mess of charred fibers that crumbled at my touch. Beneath them—I fought not to look away.

Matthew whined. Beneath Ben’s sweater, the flesh was melted, wool fused to blackened skin and frozen blisters. I was glad of the cold, which kept the odor at bay. I was glad I’d not yet eaten. Matthew’s ears drooped, and I put my arms around him, squeezing hard, breathing the frosty smell of his fur. If there’d been a fire nearby, he should have caught some scent of it. How far had Ben fled after he’d been burned, and why?

I laid him to rest. There was nothing more we could do. I piled snow over Ben once more. Matthew took the toy dinosaur in his teeth and placed it carefully atop the grave. We headed for home as the moon slipped below the horizon and a faint band of gray lit the eastern sky.

In the distance, an owl hooted sleepily. An owl’s talons could tear a person open easily enough—but when I heard the sound again, it was farther off. The deer and rabbits and mice were going hungry with the trees asleep, and that meant the owls and hawks and wild dogs were hungry, too. When they attacked, they were harder to scare off, but there’d been fewer of them as winter had worn on. We’d have been suffering more from the lack of game in town, too, if not for the emergency provisions we’d been able to lay in the past few years.

Pale yellow light smudged the horizon by the time Matthew and I reached the fields outside our town, Franklin Falls. A brown ragweed vine swung sleepily back and forth across our path. I cut the thing free and flung it into the forest. It could do little harm now, but when spring came, such vines would once again seek our blood.

If spring came. My gaze strayed to the fields beside the path. They were white with new snow, only a few dead grasses poking through. The shivering green leaves of winter potatoes and turnips and beets should have long since broken the frozen soil, but this year they hadn’t grown at all. My hand moved to Matthew’s back, and he edged closer to me. We relied on those root vegetables to help us through the spring while we waited for corn and beans and squash to grow.

The adults said that these dead fields had been normal Before, that there’d been no winter crops and spring had always come just the same. Yet even they’d grown uneasy when the pines and firs had gone brown and dropped their needles. Why trees dropping needles should be more unsettling than trees dropping leaves, I didn’t know, but after that, the Council agreed that we should go on short rations until the spring crops came in—just to be safe, they said.

“What if it’s all my fault?” I asked Matthew as my boots and his paws left prints in the snow behind us. Last week patches of brown earth had shown through, but two days ago new snow had covered them again.

Matthew gave my knee a sharp nudge. We’d had this discussion before: Matthew insisted that I wasn’t to blame, that there was no way I could have known what would happen, and that spring would likely still come.

I thought of a hillside thick with blackberry and sumac, all dead now; of the cinnamon-barked quia tree that stood among the brambles. I’d called that faerie tree into the human world, though only a few people knew it. Magic flowed in two directions; the same power that allowed me to command shadows to rest allowed me to command—to call—seeds to grow. But the quia seed had come from a dead land beyond both my world and Faerie, and now I feared I’d called death into my world as well.