Janni Simner - Faerie Winter

“Oh my goodness.” Allie burst out laughing as she buckled my boot. “You haven’t told her, have you?” Karin lifted her head as she pulled on a sweater, and I knew that whatever Allie meant, Karin didn’t know about it, either.

“Told me what?”

Allie kept laughing. “No one’s sick, Liza. The baby-to-be is as healthy as any baby can be this early on, and your mom’s healthy, too.”

“What?” I got to my feet, my other boot still unbuckled. Questions I didn’t have time for flooded me. Why hadn’t Mom told me this, either? How could she let me worry? I seized on the least important—the safest—question. “It’s been six months since your last visit,” I told Caleb severely. If Mom was six months pregnant, we all would have known.

“Baby?” Kyle asked, as if he’d only just heard.

“There have been … other visits,” Caleb said gravely. I hadn’t known that faerie folk could blush until then.

“To check for any lingering effects of the radiation.” Mom was blushing, too, even as she took Caleb’s hands in her own. “I’m sorry, Lizzy. I wasn’t sure myself at first, and then I wasn’t sure how to tell you. It didn’t seem possible, honestly.”

“That’s because it isn’t supposed to be possible.” Karin quietly pulled on pants and wool socks. “Or so we were taught. I am glad, for once, to be wrong.”

“Truly?” Mom asked her.

“Truly,” Karin said.

I felt more questions welling up. Another sister or brother—a half sister or brother—I couldn’t think about this now. It could wait, and Matthew couldn’t. I bolted for the stairs, not waiting for Karin to find shoes so she could follow. Allie ran after me, and Kyle, too. At the bottom of the staircase, Allie stopped me long enough to buckle my other boot. I’d forgotten my sling, and my balance was off again, but I didn’t go back. In the living room I caught a glint of light. Kate’s mirror—someone had drawn the wall hanging back from it. The light grew brighter, and in that light I saw—

Elin, putting her hand to the silvered glass. “I’m sorry, but I cannot stay here with you—with them.” Elin’s eyes were puffy with tears, but her gaze held steady. She took the butterfly from her hair and set it down. “I’m going home. Someone has to look after what remains of our people, too.” She stepped through the glass. I caught a glimpse of blackened trees beneath a hot blue sky, and then Elin was gone .

Her silver butterfly lay on the floor beside the mirror. A message, but not for me. There’d be time to worry about that later, too. I left it there and headed out the door.

Cold rain fell on my hair and my sweater. I held my left arm close and looked at Kyle. “Can you take me to Matthew?”

Kyle nodded and took my good hand, pulling me along. Allie followed right behind. The world around us was so green—I stumbled beneath the weight of it. Townsfolk were outside their houses, pulling up new weeds, because of course I’d called the weeds back with everything else. You didn’t get to choose what you called when you pulled life into the world.

In Kate’s backyard I saw the shed where Ethan must still be healing, its ruined roof covered with a blue tarp. Seth stood guard outside. Perhaps some of the townsfolk would be grateful that magic had healed them, but others would be more uneasy about strangers than ever.

Kyle led me on, past the Store and into the forest. Around us, oaks and maples moaned as they stretched new leaves toward the rain. A length of bright ragweed crept toward our feet. “Go away,” I whispered, and it drew back, more quickly than it would have last spring. Perhaps the plants had grown a little tamer while they’d slept.

We found Matthew hunkered down in a clearing among the trees, his fur soaked and tangled, his belly pressed into the mud. Kate knelt a few paces away, making soothing sounds, but Matthew didn’t seem to hear his grandmother.

I knew this place. It looked different without the snow and with the green, but it was the same place we’d found Ethan.

“Matthew wore his paws raw running to our town,” Allie whispered. “He made it clear he wanted Caleb and me, but he wouldn’t let us get close, and he wouldn’t shift back. He was so wild—I don’t think he wants to change, Liza.”

I walked slowly toward him. “Matthew?”

He whined and buried his nose in his scabbed and bleeding paws. It was Kate who looked up with a tired smile. “It’s good to see you awake, Liza.”

“I’ll bring him home,” I told her as I kept walking, ignoring the rain soaking through my clothes. “Just like I promised.”

The wolf growled low in his throat. I stopped and held out my hands, stone and flesh. The wolf bared his teeth. His gray eyes were dull, reminding me of a land without color or life. Yet even in that dead land there was green to be found if you were willing to fight for it.

“Call him?” Kyle asked.

“No.” I didn’t know what would happen if we forced magic on Matthew now. He’d been under glamour far longer than I had. I searched his wolf’s eyes for some sign of the boy I knew. It wasn’t just that he didn’t know me—I didn’t know him , though the dark markings around his muzzle and eyes were the same as always. He could have been any feral dog. Matthew wasn’t there.

“Hurt inside ,” Kyle whispered. I thought of my vision: Matthew’s shadow dissolving behind him as he ran. All things that live and grow have shadows . I crouched in the mud, rested my stone hand on my knees, and softened my gaze.

Matthew’s shadow wasn’t gone. It was dark and clear, a wolf’s shadow that fit beneath his fur, tight as skin. “Matthew?” The wolf didn’t answer to the name.

I softened my gaze further, eyes aching as I let all focus go. I thought not of the wolf I saw, but of the boy I knew, the one who walked by my side through dark forests. A second shadow came clear, a fainter, human shadow, huddling within the wolf’s shadow the way Karin’s shadow had huddled within the oak tree.

“Matthew.” I looked at the human shadow as I spoke, but I put no command into the words. “Matthew, look at me. Please.”

Slowly the shadow looked up. The hunch of his shoulders reminded me not of the boy I knew now, but of the younger child who’d stood, bruised and bloodied, at the edge of our town after changing to a wolf and back again for the first time. “It’s all right to be frightened,” I said, and only afterward remembered that Karin had spoken the same words to me. I reached out my hand. Matthew’s shadow reached out his. Our fingers touched—

Too cold; I jerked back. Matthew’s shadow burned colder than the human shadows I’d laid to rest on our forest patrols, colder even than Johnny’s shadow. It burned with the cold of winter unending, of the Lady’s gaze as she said worlds were winding down.

I had to try again. I had to touch him to have a chance of drawing him out. I became aware of people watching me—not only Allie and Kyle and Kate, but Mom and Caleb with Karin, and others as well. Keeping my gaze on the human shadow within the wolf, I drew a deep breath, then reached out with my other hand, the one made of stone.

The shadow drew back. “I watched,” he whispered.

“It wasn’t your fault.” The shadow shook his head, denying my words. Helping the Lady hurt others was probably the stuff of his nightmares. “It’s over,” I told him.

The wolf remained pressed to the ground, but the human shadow’s shoulders shook. “I watched him die.”

“I know, Matthew.” I didn’t deny that pain. I just kept holding out my hand.

Matthew’s shadow fingers wrapped around my stone ones. I stood, and the shadow stood with me. We faced each other, both of us trembling, both of us afraid. The wolf whined, and I saw Matthew looking out through those gray eyes. I reached down with my other hand, and he pressed his muddy nose into it. “Matthew. You’re Matthew.”