Leave No Trace, page 26
I don’t know if I’ve ever heard him speak so much at once. “Why is there a worn-up place in the cave?” I ask. “How did it start?”
Gil shakes his head and grass tumbles down. “ ’Tis beyond my ken.” He cocks his ear, as if he hears something, but all is silence to me. “What I mean to say is—to have a dark worn-up place in our forest is wrong. To have one in our—blind spot—is disaster.”
“Why?”
“Means the Ghillie Dhu is failing to keep things safe. Means Artio is failing. Our forest is full o’ unseen, an’ we work to keep it so. Keep it special. If we fail, if Artio fails—’twill be nothin’ to hold back the darkness in the cave. An’ if ’tis truly tearin’ apart, growin’—the battles may—” He falters and shoots a look over his shoulder.
We are no longer alone.
Three birds of the shiniest green, yellow, and blue flutter in and swirl round our heads, then dip back to settle on the shoulders of a woman who—like Gil—must have blended through the nothing and is now with us.
She’s a goddess. She’s a queen. Her face is so pale it’s like she’s never even thought about the sun, and she is so beautiful I can’t speak. I stare like I’m stupid at her flowing red dress and delicate red curly hair that’s floating off her shoulders like she’s got her own personal breeze.
“Ah, my Ghillie Dhu,” she says, fluttering her fingers over his hat. Gil jumps to his feet and gives a little bow. “Please do not allow me to interrupt.” She sends a smile my way, but it’s not very warm. Her birds circle her head, settling on her shoulders.
“Was only tellin’ Lexi ’bout watchin’ over the forest, mistress,” he says, and his eyes won’t meet hers. “ ’Tis but a tricky task. At least we have Artio.”
“At least we do,” she says and now that smile turns friendly. “So this is your Lexi. Our very own lorgaire.” She xtends a hand to me and I don’t know if I’m supposed to shake it or kiss it so I jump up and do a bow just like Gil. She laughs and it sounds like bells.
“Gil calls me a ‘wean’ usually,” I tell her. “Mistress.”
More bells. “I am Clíodhna, queen of the banshee,” she tells me. “You may address me as such; you are not my subject. And you are clearly no ‘wean.’ ”
“Nae,” says Gil in a soft voice.
“So what am I?”
“You are our finder,” she says, touching my chin and I feel a rush of—well, I don’t know what it is, it’s like how I felt eating ice cream—running through me. I smile with my whole face, my whole body. “Your friend Stephanie is our fuasglaiche, our fixer; Thomas is turning into a fine lighiche, a healer. They shall join us shortly.”
Hearing her say it is a funny thing. She sounds like we’re already part of a story we never signed up for. “Our? Us?”
“Indeed,” she says. “We have a need of your abilities, dear Lexi. We have need of your friends’ as well. For our world is running down and running out, and we are losing time to save it. You will both come with me, and I shall show you what I mean.”
“Is this about the war?” I ask in a small voice. She is not much taller than me but every time I look her direct in the face she seems like a giant and I’m starting to do what Gil does, look past her, not at her.
“So it is,” she says. “But before I explain further, is there anything you need to tell me, my Ghillie Dhu?”
Gil’s hands reach up for his hat, but he checks them. “Nae,” he says, words rushed. “All’s well, so it is.”
That is the first lie I have ever known Gil to tell.
Today is a day of firsts.
The Invitation
We are riding a giant white horse with a silver star on its face and a back so broad that all three of us fit and it is the finest thing I have ever done. Clíodhna’s up front, with me behind her and Gil behind me, all holding each other’s waists though really, I bet if we let go we’d never fall. Things like that just don’t happen here.
Clíodhna is taking us to the war. She didn’t say that xactly, but I understand. Over here that is the thing most important to them, the way finding Artio is to me. I also get that they think me and T.J. and Stef can help them, but how that’s supposed to happen, I don’t know. How can a person help save one world when she hardly knows anything about her own?
The horse just appeared in the white space the way everything else did—by kind of fading into it—and once we were onboard it made a mighty leap! into more nothing and then we were through the empty nothing and surrounded by instant blue-and-green Spring that made me stop breathing for a bit.
It was The Green Place. Finally. Finally. Finally.
So we’re speeding through it now and I want to jump down and run ’round like a wild person in that softly waving grass, grass that makes me think of the Great Meadow but is superior to all the grass I ever saw or walked on before. Even though it is empty. I didn’t imagine The Green Place wouldn’t have hills or cliffs or trees, just be made up of grass and sky forever.
“Is this all of it?” I turn and ask Gil.
“Nae,” he tells me. I feel his hands at my waist and get a little wiggle of happiness. “ ’Tis like a place-before.”
Clíodhna doesn’t turn but calls to us. “He means an ‘antechamber.’ It is but an introduction to our home. Few visitors come this far, and even fewer are permitted beyond to places like the palace. You are in rare company, Lexi.”
“But the palace—”
“Requires a depth of stay,” she continued. “The longer you remain, the more you see. Perhaps another time.”
Sìthiche seem to have a lot of requirements, I decide. Not always ones that make sense. I turn back to Gil and say, “We have more to talk about.”
“Aye,” he says, darting his eyes to the side. “But. Later. ’Twill be time, ken?”
I want to talk now. I want to discuss Jim. I’m not dumb: Jim went into the cave and didn’t come out, if I believe Samuel was shine-o-la in his journal and I do. That means Jim either died in the cave or he kept going and fell into a hole and landed here in The Green Place which means he’s not dead at all and I bet Gil knows the answer to all of it. I will ask him. And he will tell me.
I also want to know why Gil kept the blind spot place from his queen. It scared him, hearing about it. Maybe I should be the one to tell her. But—I’ll wait.
“Look ’round,” he says. “Observe the world about ye.”
Truth: I do want to see this world, this empty, color-bursting world that makes my heart sing. Our ride is so smooth—no bounces, no thuds. It’s like we’re floating above the grass. I settle in and put my hands back on Clíodhna’s waist and touching her is like having a waking dream. I look out into the fields and see my mother tying up my shoes before school. I see me climbing a tree with Jim, scramble-racing to the top. I see myself finishing a book in the cabin and looking up in time to see Daddy whack a log outside and the sun come out from the clouds and light him all up. Small things. Life things. But it’s like I’m there again and tears are rolling down my face. The real shine-o-la.
So much for never crying again.
I start noticing something on the horizon, something far away that is getting bigger, then larger, then the biggest thing ever. It’s an oak the size of ten trees tied together. Maybe twenty. The white horse with the silver star slows without being told to and trots toward the trunk. Shade falls on us cool like rain but not wet.
On a branch a few feet off the ground sit Stef and T.J.
I slide down and leap off the horse before it even comes to a stop and run over to them. Stef jumps off her own perch and runs to me and we give each other big hugs. “Shit,” she tells me. “I woke up and you were gone, girl.”
“They took me to a room full of nothing,” I say. “Gil was there. So was Clíodhna.”
Gil waves at her from the horse, while Clíodhna just nods. The white horse paws the ground like he has someplace to be.
“You saw the palace!” T.J. cries. He looks hardly different at all and definitely not frayed like an old blanket like me and Stef seem after a winter in the woods. He’s dressed like he ought to be Clíodhna’s son, not a singer with a voice that makes you like him a lot. Lighiche, that’s what she called him. But what does he heal?
Then I remember. “T.J.,” I say and he looks at me right on. I touch my cheek. “Will you sing to me?”
He doesn’t even wait. There’s music on his lips and words coming out and I close my eyes and it’s like he’s reaching inside me and putting me back together again. I get a funny feeling in my gut and lower and my heart starts pounding but I feel it mostly in my face, the skin pulling and touching and knitting back together again. He stops after a few seconds and I open my eyes.
Stef is crying but also laughing. “How’s that shit?” she asks me.
I reach up and my face is—my face. No burning places. Just smooth lines in my smooth cheek. Better, like Gil promised. “Oh,” I say. “Oh.” And I jump forward and kiss T.J. right on his lips and he kisses me back and I wish for just a minute that no one else was anywhere around because then I might want to do things besides kissing—
“Lexi,” says the queen, and I stop what I’m doing.
“Sorry,” I say and my face is all hot. So is T.J.’s. I look at him and think: Why did I want to do that? “Thanks,” I tell him. I shoot a look at Stef. She’s biting her lip and I can’t tell if she’s mad or laughing at me.
“No problem,” mumbles T.J.
“Come to, now,” says Gil. The horse gets on his knees and now there are five of us on its back and I can’t imagine how this works—but the back is still wide and long enough for us all. I make sure I’m up near the queen. I want to keep my waking dreams going. It’s like I’m in them—I can smell Jim’s sweat, my cooking in the cabin—and I can do things I never could in the real world. Dreaming, I can hold a living Hey Fox and tell her again how sorry I am. Dreaming, I don’t have to think about kissing T.J. again.
’Ventually the horse stops again and we slide off; it runs away across the endless grass and I wish for a minute I could run like that, never getting tired, pounding the ground and going places.
“We walk,” says Clíodhna.
“How come?” asks T.J. with a whine in his voice.
Stef rolls her eyes and whispers to me, “That boy would hire a palanquin and get himself carried everywhere if he could.” I have no idea what that is, but I can imagine what she means: T.J. hasn’t changed at all in five months. I grin behind my hand.
The queen drapes her arm round T.J.’s shoulders as we strike out across the field, and after only a few steps it’s not so green anymore. It gets tufty and the tufts are yellow and brown. Then the ground starts bumping up with rocks, then whole patches of nothing but bare ground.
“The unseen is thin here,” Clíodhna explains when we start up a steep rise. “We dare not work magic as we grow closer.”
“Closer to what?” asks Stef.
“To the border.”
The rise ends as a drop-off, and we stop right before the edge. It’s a much higher cliff than any I’ve ever climbed with my monkey toes and fingers, way higher than Blueberry Cliff. The sky here is ash-gray and smells like burning meat and smoke and crispy electricity. We stand in a loose semicircle, looking over the cliff edge, which winds far away in both directions as far as I can see. I look down, to the ground.
It’s a flat, empty plain that’s mostly brown and only some green, and any trees are just blackened sticks. It looks like the whole ground has been used for target practice and is all torn up and messy. There’s a smoking, dark wavy line that shimmers and I think it’s moving—but so slow you almost might miss it. On the other side of that burn mark things aren’t so empty: Dots of people run here and there and I think I hear some pops and sizzles that make me think of the PEP Tony used on Gillie.
For the first time I touch the coat that’s been tied round my waist since it got hot in the cave. I feel for the pocket and yep, it’s still there. The PEP. I haven’t lost it.
“That’s the—war?” asks Stef.
“A portion of it,” says Clíodhna.
“Where?” I wonder. “Here?”
“Breizh,” says the queen. “In a land you call France; some know it as Brittany.”
“France?” Stef gasps. “Can’t be.”
“But it is,” says Clíodhna. “Were you down in the midst of it, you would not be able to see us here. You would gaze out over the waters, to England in the distance, perhaps.” She pauses. “There was a divide, once. We passed through into your worlds only rarely—certainly not as often as we were given credit for—and peace reigned between our folk. But in recent years that has changed. The worn-up areas—our apertures—have begun widening, joining to one another. This is the largest and shows no signs of slowing.”
The high, light quality in her voice is gone, and she sounds angry and afraid. “Think of it as a bubble that stretches and tears but does not rupture. As this bubble expands, it erases this world—and is replaced by your world. Not expanded. Not made better. Our land simply vanishes.”
“How?” I whisper. “Why?”
Clíodhna shakes her head. “We sense a uilebheist is behind it. A creature half made like we are and half like you are, raging and obsessed. Someone who finds a sensitive area and pours all of his unseen into it out of fear, or hatred.”
I turn to look at her. She knows more than she says. She knows more than any of us, and that includes Gil.
“This isnae in your country yet—just here,” Gil says quickly. “But. W’out Artio an’ her unseen, the forest is helpless. Ken?”
I can’t look at him. He’s telling me I’m sentencing the forest to what’s down there if I kill that killer bear.
“Alas, we are without true understanding and time is not our friend,” says Clíodhna. “None of us have the strength we once did; you may see many wondrous things when you visit us here, but we are drained and fading. This has been going on for at least twenty-five of your years, but for us it is so much faster. We are unable to react with alacrity. We need humans who are willing to help.”
I bite my lip, much sadder than I realized I might be. The Green Place is like nowhere else and I can’t imagine it not being there. What happens to Gil? To Clíodhna? To all their snow white horses wearing silver stars?
“We were like you once, and you were like us once,” says Stef. “So—maybe it’s time that it came down. Maybe we should reunite.”
“Alas, we are very different; your kind fear and distrust the very air we breathe,” says Clíodhna. “And we have lost the skills of crafting things; what you did with your grandmother’s timepiece is unseen even I must marvel at. If we cannot use our native skills among your kind, we are without purpose. Vestigial.”
“Why are sìthiche leaving?” I ask. “Why would anyone leave?”
“Some believe the destruction of our land is inevitable,” she says. “Some are curious. Many wish to make trouble. Some who no longer are under my sight believe they could take over and rule humans. There are as many reasons as there are stars in the sky.”
“Yeah, but what can we do?” asks T.J. There’s a crack in his voice. “We’re not special.”
Stef looks at him with wonder.
Clíodhna begins walking down the rocky rise and we follow. When she gets to the bottom, she turns. “This war has thus far been contained because the border between our world and yours has only parted in places where we have long residence—lands you call England. Ireland. Scotland. Wales.” She is speaking with all of us but looking direct at me. “We have had lesser presence in Brittany, but there is still a strong connection. Lexi, your forest is a form of—outpost for us. A place of your world that we have made our own. Gil visits at my request to watch over it and the creatures who reside in it. Artio holds all the unseen we can give her and provides protection. Should a rift like the one you just saw begin in one of our outposts, we would need to know immediately. It is very important.”
She knows already about the cave’s worn-up place. Samuel would do this to me from time to time, speak a little about something he knew a lot about—then wait for me to fill in the gaps. But I don’t want to get Gil in trouble.
Stef does it for me. “You tell her about the cave?” she asks, looking at me. “The dark hole and the scratching and the big empty pit that brought us here?”
Around us the air grows cold and light fades from Clíodhna’s face.
Gil steps to one side. “I must away,” he says, and begins to make a small turn—but Clíodhna raises a hand and he stands fast.
“You and I will speak in time,” says Clíodhna to him in a deep, angry voice. She looks at me and tempers her tone. “Yes, I am aware of that aperture, though it has not been seen by our kind in thousands of years. I believe it has always been there, waiting, but that its discovery by your father made it powerful, Lexi. He fed it his unseen and has let it grow. Expand. Perhaps—create a new tear in your own world. We cannot know as yet.”
“He sent Jim inside,” I say. “And—I think he hurt him there.”
She takes in a long breath and when she breathes out, I smell flowers. Bluebells, maybe. “Your brother came to us, badly done in. We were unable to mend him, and he did not survive.” She looks at Gil, who looks away. “I believe it was your father’s doing, to strike him, and I believe that act has only fed the darkness inside the cave.”
My eyes are burning.
Clíodhna turns to Gil. “Artio is weakening,” she says. “She should have prevented their entering that cave. You swore she would be enough over there.”
Gil dances to one side. “ ’Twould be best to speak of … at a very other time,” he says, but I’m hardly hearing him. I’m picturing me with a rock in my hand and Stef with a rock in her hand and then we are Jim and Samuel and—Samuel’s aim is faster and stronger than Jim’s. Jim goes down. Jim is … gone.
