Faerie Winter

Weaver work. Arianna struggled to her feet. “Kill Tara, my cat! Kill her!”

The words hurt as they clawed through my skin. I whirled and ran after Mom. That I was Liza, that I’d made promises—both were less important than that I was the Lady’s cat and needed to please her.

Mom wheeled around a trunk and ran back toward me. I bounded past, unable to slow down fast enough. By the moon’s light I saw the glint of steel in Mom’s hand once more. She leaped at the Lady in her tangled dress, and Arianna fell back to the ground beneath her. Elin pressed her hand to the Lady’s shoulder, holding her down, eyes brimming as the cloth of her grandmother’s dress wrapped tighter and tighter around her.

They were hurting the Lady. Why were they hurting her? I leaped at Mom’s back.

Arianna’s hand tore through a bound sleeve to grab my paw. “You and your mother shall suffer yet,” she hissed.

I felt my skin and bones burning, melting, shifting. I turned from a cat into a wild dog as the Lady’s magic poured through me, from a dog into an eagle, from an eagle into a slithering snake. I roared and howled, shrieked and hissed, as faster and faster I changed. Mom crawled out from underneath me. I struggled to get closer to Arianna and the pain she commanded. Mom tried to pull me away, but I fought her. For an instant I was human once more, kneeling naked in the mud and clinging to the Lady’s hand as an icy wind raked my skin, and then I was changing once more, slowly changing to immovable stone. The Lady’s gaze met mine, and in her eyes I saw winter unending and the knowledge that spring was nothing more than a story. “All things must end,” she whispered, and fell still.

Glamour rolled off me, and all at once my thoughts were my own. I was alone—alone and human and very small—my hand clutching the Lady’s. She stared at the sky, her dress wrapped around her, binding her legs, constricting her throat. Mom’s knife was plunged through her heart.

She wasn’t breathing. The magic she’d poured into me had been her last.

“I’m sorry,” Elin whispered to her, kneeling beside us. “But you shouldn’t have hurt my mother.”

“Nor my daughter, either.” Mom’s voice was grim. Mud streaked her face, and her arm bled freely through her sleeve.

Horror filled me at what I’d nearly done. I tried to pull away from the Lady, but my left hand was strange and heavy in her grasp. I looked down at our clasped hands.

My hand was gray stone past the wrist, and the Lady’s fingers were wrapped around it. Mom crouched beside me and uncurled those dead fingers from mine, one by one.

I drew my hand to my face. My stone fingers were curled halfway into a fist. Matthew’s leather hair tie was wrapped around my arm just past the place where stone gave way to skin. My stomach churned, and I had to look away. My hand fell to my side, and its weight sent more pain through my shoulder.

I looked to where the Lady lay. Her eyes were dull as tarnished steel, and I could almost see the gray bones beneath her pale skin. As I watched, the fireflies in her hair flickered out, one by one.

“Liza?” There was a question in Mom’s voice.

I couldn’t look at her. I stumbled to my feet and turned away, ashamed. The cold mud hurt my bare feet, the cold air my bare skin.

Mom wrapped her arms around me from behind. “Don’t you dare sacrifice yourself to save me, Liza. Not ever again. Enough of this. It ends here.” Her voice was scraped raw.

I hadn’t saved her. I’d nearly killed her. I would have torn out her throat without a second thought. I shook like a leaf in the wind. I was so, so cold.

Elin touched the Lady’s dress, and fibers flowed away from Arianna to wrap around Elin’s own bare skin, brown wool sheathing her chest and legs, leaving the weaver in a sleeveless dress and the Lady in a shroud as thin as gauze from Before. Elin stalked to the oak tree—to Karin—and put one hand to the rough bark. Her other arm hung, bruised and scabbed over, by her side.

She was crying. Karin’s clothes were scattered around the tree’s base, the silver butterfly’s wings trembling among them. In the mud and leaf litter between oak and quia, I saw Kyle’s footprints disappearing over the hillside, and Matthew’s wolf prints as well. I remembered the dead look in Matthew’s eyes. I had to find him.

My pants and sweater and wool underwear lay on the ground. I tried to dress myself against the cold, but I couldn’t do it with my dead hand and injured shoulder. Mom helped me. I avoided her eyes as she used her left hand to ease my undershirt and sweater over my head and held out my underwear and pants for me to step into. Her right wrist hung wrong—it was surely broken—and above it, the arm I’d bitten still bled.

“You should have run.” I managed to get my boots buckled myself. “You should have run and kept the leaf safe.” Kept yourself safe.

“You should have known better than to expect me to.” Mom handed me my coat. I stepped away from her to put it on.

A hand snaked around from behind me. I felt a knife at my throat once more as the coat fell from my grasp.

“Call her back, Summoner.” Elin’s voice had a feral edge. “Do it of your own free will or do it under glamour, it matters not. Waste no more time. Do it.”

Mom stepped toward us, and Elin stiffened. She was frightened, I realized, frightened of us small, glamourless humans. Her voice thickened into a syrupy sweetness. “Do it now. Call my mother back.”

“Stop!” I said while my thoughts remained my own. “Of course I want to call Karin back. I’d do more than that for her.”

“Why would you?” Elin demanded, the glamour gone from her words. “Why should a human care for my people at all?”

“I don’t know your people. But I do know your mother.” Karin, with her kindness and her teaching. I didn’t know who the plant mage had been Before. I only knew who she was now. “You have my word, Elianna. I’ll do all I can to save her. But I can’t do anything until you take the knife away.”

Elin drew back, taking the knife—one of Karin’s knives, with a dark stone blade—with her. “I will kill you if she dies. Do not doubt it.”

I ignored her and walked to the oak tree. Deep scores ran down the bark, and sap flowed slowly out of them. I’d done that, too. I forced the thought aside as I softened my gaze. I saw Karin’s shadow within the tree— head between her knees, hands pressed to the ground. I felt the spark of life that was Karin, fainter and colder now. She was still there. I put my good hand to the rough bark.

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