Lili Crow - Wayfarer

A wave of exhaustion crashed over her, carried her across the floor, and deposited her into the soft gray bed again. She sank down, snuggling under the covers, and the leafshadows on the ceiling were skulls and bony hands until she blinked. Then they were normal, just branches dancing on the wind.

“I don’t ever want to leave.” Her furtive whisper took her by surprise, rippled the air like a pebble thrown into a still pond. “Not even if she throws me out.” I’m staying. I don’t care what happens. Ellie lay stiffly for a long while, watching the branches move as the hot tears trickled down her temples, vanishing into her hair.

I won’t ever go back to Laurissa. I’ll walk into the core first. The scary thing wasn’t thinking that. It was the quiet, sure knowledge that once she started moving that direction, she wouldn’t stop.

If the core didn’t kill her it would Twist her, because of the black scratching thing she had flung at the Strep. A curse, almost as black as Laurissa’s own work on a gaudy, loud-ticking watch. There was the wounded look on Cami’s face, too, and Ruby’s dismissal. Let her go .

Well, they had. Now it was her turn to let her fingers unclench a bit, and just let things go too.

When sleep finally came, there were no more dreams.

“HOLD IT SO, LITTLE COLUMBA.” AUNTIE’S SPIDERY FINGERS curled around a dandelion’s stem. “Now, pouf! ”

A symbol flashed blue-white and the plant shriveled, almost crying out as its leaves curled up and blackened. Under the flood of sunshine, Ellie shivered. “That looks unpleasant. Are you sure it won’t Twist you?”

“No fear. See?” The stem, turning papery black, curled in a corkscrew. “A mirror does not Twist. Impossible.”

Ellie’s eyebrows drew together. “But that . . .” She studied the ripples of Potential spreading from the charming. Is it really that simple? It can’t be, or someone would have figured it out by now. All it took was looking in the right place, and you could spin the effects of a nasty charm somewhere else . It would ripple through ambient Potential and the wave would die down, an ocean seamlessly repairing itself.

Is that even legal?

Who knew? A chill worked down Ellie’s back as the bees hummed their drowsy song. She rubbed at the sore spot on her chest—there was a bruise, a small dark one, maybe from a button digging in while she leaned over the rain barrel to scrub off algae. Or maybe from thrashing around during nightmares.

Even in the sun, the breeze was suddenly cold. She didn’t have a sweater, just her Juno blazer, which hung accusingly in the tiny closet. Right next to her dusty schoolbag.

I don’t care if I ever wear it again.

Auntie creaked to her feet, leaving the blackened dandelion to shred itself into ash and dirt, making the garden richer. “No sunwheels, Columba. Spin, or pull the weed.”

“Yes ma’am.” I don’t know if I can. She found another bright yellow flower, just sitting minding its own business in the middle of a riot of other things—tomato vines with hard green fruit swelling toward ripeness, leafy green potato plants, petunias, mandrake, and deadly nightshade crowding around each other with slightly embarrassing vitality.

Aren’t you afraid of poisoning yourself, Auntie?

Auntie is not stupid , the old lady had sniffed.

Ellie began weeding, whispering a loosening-charm to get the juicy pungent taproot out of the dark, damp soil. The old woman hummed as she went around the corner of the house, and Ellie hunched her shoulders. I saw how she did it.

So what’s stopping me?

The next dandelion was a tiny runt-like one, and she felt a little sorry for it. Well, honestly, either she was going to rip it up out of the ground where it was minding its own business, or she was going to charm it to death. It would die in slow agony, wilting in the compost heap, or it could be finished quickly.

Which was better?

Her fingers sketched the symbol. A bright blue-white spark, and she spun the twisting down the taproot, delicately.

The dandelion immediately shredded into a spiraling puff of ash. It was just so easy. The spreading ripples melted together, and Ellie examined her fingers.

Garden dirt under her bitten-short nails, a cupped palm, and long slim fingers. A blur of charmlight, because she was alive, emitting Potential like everything did. Even machines exuded something , any complex system threw off little bits of energy that melded into eddies and swirls that charmers tapped into. Maybe there was just a cosmic drain backed up somewhere, something falling in and plugging it around the time of the Great War, and the whole Reeve just the energetic version of a stuck toilet.

Which would make minotaurs . . . what? Torrents instead of swirls and eddies, or swimmers drowning in energy waste?

The problem with metaphors was that they broke down so damn easily . Ellie cursed under her breath. She pulled three dandelions for every one she charm-killed, and carried the wilting wounded to the compost pile at the back of Auntie’s garden, a simmering mess of vegetable stew inside a white-painted cage. The hives off to her left hummed sleepily, and she cast them a nervous glance.

There was an elm tree looming over the fence, black-barked and shifting in a cool breeze, and she tossed the dandelions in with what probably should have been a whispered charm.

Instead, what came out was a soft “I’m sorry.”

Apologizing to plants. I’m going to be as cracked as Auntie before long. That’d be just fine with me, too.

“She’s talking to weeds,” someone said, and Ellie almost leapt out of her skin. “Girl’s crazy for sure.” It came from above , and as she stared, the shifting branchlight hid him for a long moment.

“Mithrus Christ ,” she breathed. “What are you doing up there?”

“Looking for you. This was as close as I could get.” Avery Fletcher crouched on a branch that looked too spindly to hold his weight, clutching grimly at another branch, this one dead.

“You’re going to break your neck ,” she whisper-screamed. For some reason she couldn’t get in enough air to yell at him. “What is wrong with you?”

“I could ask you the same thing. You never called.”

You should be thanking me for not dragging you down with me. “Auntie doesn’t have a phone.”

“Auntie?”

“She lives here.”

His nose wrinkled like he smelled something bad. Maybe he did, he was right above the compost. “And you do too, now, I guess? Do you know how hard it is to find this place?”

Which meant he’d looked. A traitorous little weed of hopeful heat rose inside her chest; she quashed it as sternly as she could. “Some charmers don’t want to be found. Look, I thought of calling you, but—”

“But what? You decided I wasn’t worth the effort?” He had twigs stuck in his gleaming hair, and his eyes were more gold than green now. For a moment he looked fey, his coloring blending into wood and leaf. “Your friends are climbing the walls. You could have let someone know where you were.”

“Why, so Laurissa can drag me back and make a mint off . . .” She clapped her dirty hand over her mouth, trapping the secret behind her teeth.

He just nodded, not even looking surprised. “Yeah, I pretty much figured those weren’t her work. They sold fast, though. And they dried up when you disappeared. No more Choquefort-Sinder work on the market now.”

Yet another reason to stay as far away from Laurissa as possible. If Fletcher had found her, someone else could—and would Auntie still want her if there was trouble?