Anne Bishop - Sebastian

She looked at her brother. “Are you with me, Lee?”

He put one hand over hers. “Always.”

“Then we have work to do. Talk to Teaser. Find out everything you can about where Sebastian was headed when he left with the wizard. We need to find the bridge that connects my landscapes with Wizard City. And then we need to deliver a message to the wizards.”

“Glorianna…it’s a trap. That’s why they wanted Sebastian.”

“It’s a trap,” she agreed. “But Sebastian isn’t the bait.”

Glorianna watched Lee raise a hand in thanks as the demon cycles raced back to the Den.

“Well,” he said, “that was clear thinking on Sebastian’s part to ask the demon cycles to linger in this landscape to show us where the bridge was located.”

She sniffed because, somehow, being miffed seemed like the right thing to do. “I’m sure he didn’t tell them it was all right to chase the waterhorses.”

“They didn’t chase the little ones. They made a point of telling you that.”

“Oh. Well. That makes it all right. What?” The last because Lee was grinning at her.

“We’re squabbling.”

“We are not.”

“Are too.”

“Are—” She stopped. She always felt as if she were ten years old when they started one of these arguments. “Maybe. So what if we are?”

“We only squabble when something has been wrong and we know it’s going to be all right again. So I guess this idea of yours isn’t so daft after all.”

“It’s not daft.” Risky, certainly. And dangerous if it didn’t work as well as she thought it would. But not daft. “Why did you have the demon cycles leave us here?” She waved a hand at the stand of trees.

“Because I can feel the bridge.” Lee headed in a westerly direction and continued talking over his shoulder. “And I figured if we’re moving at a walking pace, you’d have a better feel of the land and more warning if the Eater left any nasty surprises in this landscape.”

Since she hadn’t found the anchor the Eater had established in the waterhorses’ landscape, and nasty surprises were a distinct possibility, she hurried to catch up to Lee and link her arm through his—both as a sign of sisterly affection and because, if there was danger, she could take them both back to her gardens in a heartbeat as long as she was touching him.

“Do you remember that time when Mother was sick for a whole week?” Glorianna asked.

“I remember.” Lee smiled. “I was about nine and you were eleven.”

She nodded. “Neighbors brought soups and broths for her, but we pretty much fended for ourselves—and survived my cooking.”

“You went to the butcher’s and the grocer’s for food—”

“—with you helping to pull your sled, since it was too snowy to use anything else.”

“The grocer was impressed that we were buying vegetables instead of sweets.”

“And oranges, remember? They came from the south and traveled through a dozen landscapes before they got to Aurora, and each one cost more than the spending money Mother gave me for a week.”

“You bought six of them,” Lee said softly. “And each day you peeled one and divided the sections three ways because you said the oranges would keep us from getting sick and help Mother get well.”

“We didn’t squabble at all during those days,” Glorianna said just as softly.

“We were afraid she was going to die. It had been a hard winter. Other people in the village had died of influenza or pneumonia. We were half-grown and so scared. She’d never been that sick before.”

“So we didn’t squabble. We kept the house orderly and did the lessons our teachers brought over so we wouldn’t fall behind in school…and we didn’t squabble.”

“Until Mother was well again.” Lee laughed. “And then we drove her halfway mad with it because we’d argue over the least little thing.”

“Yes.”

They walked in silence for a while. Then Glorianna said, “I love you, Lee.”

“Don’t.” His voice got sharp. “People start saying things like that when they think they might not have another chance to say them.”

“It’s not that. I’m just…having a sentimental moment.”

“Oh. In that case, I love you, too. I—” He tensed when she stopped walking. “What is it?”

“Dissonance. Up ahead. There’s something there that doesn’t belong in this landscape.”

“The bridge is up ahead too.”

They moved cautiously, Lee scanning the area around them for signs of some kind of creature, while Glorianna kept her eyes focused on the ground, looking for any telltale warnings that they were about to step into another landscape.

Small. Much smaller than the pond. She’d been able to sense the dissonance in the pond from her gardens on the Island in the Mist, but this alteration of the landscape had eluded her until she’d gotten close to it.

Lee led them to the bridge, then stopped two man-lengths away. “The ground is torn up around the left side of the bridge. Looks like a struggle took place here.”

Glorianna nodded. “But Ephemera stripped the grass and wildflowers around that circle of dead grass in response to whatever happened here. And that circle looks slightly higher than the rest of the ground.”

“An access point to an underground den?” Lee asked.

Thinking about the creatures Sebastian had seen at the school, it came to her. “Trap spider. That’s its lair. But…the dissonance doesn’t feel strong enough. I don’t think the Eater’s creature is there anymore.” She slowed her breathing, waited for her heartbeat to settle. She could feel the currents of Ephemera’s power all around her, wanting to respond to a heart—and reluctant to respond with a piece of the Eater’s landscapes so close. The currents of power were tangled up, knotted. Without direction, there was no telling what the world would manifest.

She walked a circle around the trap spider’s lair, careful to stay a hand-width outside of the barren ground.

Hear me, Ephemera, she called as she circled. Listen to my heart. Tapping into the currents of Light and a single thread of the Dark, she altered the landscape, sending the trap spider’s lair into the place of stones that she had already taken out of the world when she’d blocked the Eater’s attempt to anchor the bonelovers’ landscape to the Den.

The trap spider’s lair and the barren ground around it disappeared, leaving a deep hole—a hole the world wanted to fill.

Listen to me. Listen to my heart.

It knew her. She was like the Old Ones who had known when to play with the Light and when a place needed currents of the Dark.

Soil, Glorianna thought, keeping her mind focused on the task, letting her heart beat with the promise of pleasure. Rich soil to fill the hole. Soil that matches the earth here.

Ephemera hesitated, then manifested what the heart desired. Pleasure filled the heart—and the other heart nearby. Its currents of power began to untangle. Was there more to play with?

Stone, the heart commanded. Not the stone of anger, the stone of strength.

It resonated with the heart, resonated with the land around it to find the stone the heart wanted and make more of it.

Stone formed around the back half of the circle, gray and strong. Not high. Not big. It stopped when the heart said “enough.”

Smaller stones to shape a border. And a circle of stones where the Bad Thing had made a place for Itself.

Flowers, the heart said. The breath of living things. So it manifested flowers that liked to live in this part of itself.

And one more. This time the heart resonated so strongly, there was no choice but to manifest exactly what the heart wanted. But it knew this plant. This had come from the Old Ones’ hearts to help the world heal. Wherever it grew, the Bad Thing could not change the world into something completely terrible, because hearts that could feel the resonance of the plant would always hold a little Light.