Leave No Trace, page 27
Clíodhna adjusts Gil’s hat on his head. “Go,” she says. “We will speak.”
And with a slight twist in his step, Gil vanishes completely.
“Wait—” I call, but he’s gone. And we have so much more to say.
The queen folds her arms. “We have fought wars on many occasions, against many races and creatures. This one—is different. This is the one that threatens our actual existence, and the one we seem to be the least equipped to wage. We must find a way to recapture our own borders while at the same time look for a way to live with your people—in case we are unable to do so. Both are intolerable, and both appear to have just become much worse. We have tried many things, and none have succeeded.”
“Tony,” I say. “He was a thing you tried.”
T.J. stares at me. “He was?”
“Yes,” says Clíodhna. “I gave him a task, but he did not—complete it. Clearly, we erred in choosing him. But we believe we have what we need right now, right here.”
“Me?” says T.J., perking up.
Stef rolls her eyes. “I think she means the three of us.”
Clíodhna nods. “Yes: We need one who can find the way, one who understands how to make the pieces into a whole, and one who can heal. These talents you have are freshly awoken. Stay here and refine them. In time, help us repair the breach.”
In time, I think. “How much … time?”
“I cannot know,” says Clíodhna.
“But—Gil always said people lose time here,” I say. “And your kind lose your memories in our world.”
“True,” she says. “The longer you are here, the more time passes at home. This is not a small sacrifice.”
T.J. chuckles. “I’ve got a spare couple of days,” he says. “Already been here a week, so why not. Make a bigger splash once we walk out of the woods finally.”
Stef frowns. “T.J., it’s March,” she says, and the date lands like a rock tossed into a lake.
T.J. frowns. “Cute,” he says. “It’s October.”
“They speak the truth,” says Clíodhna. “Each day here is far longer in your world. That is what I mean by asking much of you. Your time runs so quickly for us, it is difficult to catch hold of a moment or a person at the right time. We glance away for an instant and then everything has changed. This war has sprung upon us with virtually no warning; one moment things were as they always have been and then the next we began losing hold. We cannot keep up. This is why we need your help, your insight.” She takes his hand. “But I will not keep the truth from you: To stay with us is to return to a world that may have forgotten you.”
T.J. runs his hands through his hair, stands up, and paces. “Everyone at home is gonna think we died,” he says.
“Probably,” says Stef.
“Where is Tony?” T.J. whirls on Clíodhna, upset and looking around. “We need Tony here.”
“Anthony has been made well and dispatched,” she says. “There is no place for him here anymore. He is not the hero we are looking for.”
“So we stay, and he can’t. We stay and lose everything out there, and it’s all to help you?”
Clíodhna nods. “That is the essence of it.”
T.J.’s jaw clenches, unclenches. If he was like Gil I bet his skin would be shifting colors, he’s thinking so hard. He wants to stay; I can feel it. I mean, I’ve only been here a couple hours and I can’t imagine not wanting to stay.
And I would stay, xcept I have one thing left to do. Even though I don’t know that I can even do it anymore. My last thing is killing Artio—and it’s not something that can happen. Not if I love The Green Place. Not if I love … Gil. My one last thing—if I do it right—means the woods are unprotected.
“Wow,” says T.J. finally. “That’s not really a choice. Tony should be here.”
“He cannot be,” says Clíodhna.
“Tell me why.”
“Do not make demands of me,” she says, eyes fierce. “Let him tell you.”
T.J. flinches at her anger. He knots his hands, stares at the ground. Finally Stef puts a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay,” she says. “We’ll go.”
Well, if they’re both going and I have my own plan, looks like none of us are staying. But my stomach hurts; this is not what should be happening. We’ve been asked for help, and ’cause T.J. wants to stick up for Tony, we’re all running away. “I’ll come back,” I tell the queen. “I just have something to do first.”
“Take heed of that notion,” Clíodhna warns me. “I know what is in your heart, Lexi, and I can only say that you should listen to the Ghillie Dhu in this matter. Should you complete your task, we cannot allow you back here. You will be to us as Anthony now is.”
All or nothing, then.
“We understand that we ask things of you that are difficult to give. But if you will not help us, you will never find ways to use your talents beyond mere parlor-room tricks. A watch is not a world; a voice is not a cure.” She looks at me. “A direction is not destiny.”
My head is starting to hurt; I have so much to think about.
“So—if we leave, we can’t do … the things we can do?” T.J. asks.
“Yeah,” says Stef. “I thought—these were things inside of us. That you all woke up.”
“They are,” she says. “But the three of you have mere seedlings of ability. Without the proper light, or water, or food, seedlings wither. We feel it is a worthy exchange.”
Suddenly this is all feeling sour and wrong, like we’ve fallen into that black hole again. I spent so many years wanting to come to The Green Place—and now I can’t wait to leave.
“For all that bodes well, a price must be paid,” I say. “I hear that a lot.”
“It is fair,” she tells me.
“Well,” I say. “Sometimes a person does something just because. Not to get a gift. But because you care enough.” I look at Stef and T.J. “I care about them. I want to be here more than anything but they didn’t ask for help. And they need it if they’re gonna leave the woods. So I’m giving it to them. Then I’ll do what I have to. Or not.”
Clíodhna sighs and takes my face in her hands. She kisses me on the forehead and glances at all of us. “This loss of time together saddens me,” she says. “But … I suspect you will return.”
I can almost hear the queen’s voice in my head: It is inevitable.
“Don’t kidnap me again,” says T.J., but his tone indicates he wouldn’t mind it a bit. I get it: It’s impossible to come here once and not want to come back the whole rest of your life.
Clíodhna smiles at me.
“Follow me,” I say, holding up my hands to say the abracadabras again. I cut a glance at her. “You haven’t taken this one away from me yet, have you?”
No, she hasn’t.
Bear Necessities
Tony’s mouth has gone bone dry while listening to Jim. He’d like nothing more right now than a drink of cold water.
As if on cue, a small brook begins babbling nearby. At its edge a bowl-shaped rock sits waiting for Tony to scoop up his drink before sipping it. It’s so clear, cold, and pure it even puts the water he drank out of an Icelandic glacier stream to shame.
He turns back to Jim, wiping the back of his mouth with his hand. “You’re … Artio.” He shakes his head. “Can’t be.”
“Well, I’m part of her, let’s say,” says Jim. “What Gillie wanted was what was inside me—that unseen they keep talking about. I was dying and she put her mouth to my lips and did something to me that pulled me out of my body. My … soul, if you believe we have those. Spirit if you don’t.”
“Sounds like she did CPR on you and told you a funny tale,” growls Tony. “You’ve been hoodwinked.”
“The body—my body—died. She took it back to the surface and sank it in a lake.” Jim is nearly as cool as the water Tony just drank. “I’ve gone swimming in the lake while inside the bear. I’ve seen … me. My body is still down there, just bones and rotted clothes. There is no corporeal me now.”
They are silent for a long beat. Tony envisions, as best he can, what it must be like to feel your essence inside another creature—like a suit—swimming weightlessly past the discarded remnants of your old casing. Is it what a snake feels like, seeing the skin it shed? Or is it like seeing your twin, unreachable and lost?
“So she put your—soul—into the bear?”
“Artio needs a human soul to anchor her in the real world; without one she’s just a bear, a bear that can die easy as any creature,” he goes on. “The last unseen inside her was crumbling away; had been in there centuries, I got the impression.”
“And if you said no?”
“Then she said she’d let me go. When the soul escapes—she said—it appears as a butterfly that finishes the journey to the next world, whatever that next world is. I didn’t think long. I told her that was fine by me.”
Tony frowns. Who could make that decision so quickly?
“It wasn’t hard to decide. I was pissed at my father and terrified for my sister. Gillie told me if I was Artio, I could keep an eye on Lexi, make sure he didn’t go after her with a rock one day.”
“So that was it.”
Jim takes a deep breath. “I had a condition—that she release me for good once the old man was dead. I didn’t want to end up crumbling after centuries being a half bear, half person. It seemed—indecent. She was okay with that. But you know how they operate here—”
“There are no free lunches.”
“I kept up my end. Lexi has no idea I’ve been around all this time, and that’s okay by me. Better if she doesn’t remember me like this. Better to let her think—”
“That you ran off.”
“The problem is that Samuel is dead. Five months now. And Gillie isn’t making any moves to let me go. She needs another unseen, something she’s not able to get at the drop of a hat. Samuel would have been perfect, but she wasn’t prepared. She didn’t see that one coming. Truth is, neither did I. Considering what that old man did to his kids, he deserved a lot worse than getting impaled on a stag’s antler.” Jim’s jaw is tight. “It all happened pretty fast.”
Tony leans back on his hands, mind on fire. He thought he understood how this other world could be dangerous and attractive and irresistible and capricious and completely out of his control. He understood nothing, it seems. “Why tell me all this?”
“When it first happened, being Artio was the greatest thing ever—like tasting the world again for the first time. But I’ve learned that it doesn’t take centuries to start crumbling. Lately, every time I become the bear I lose more of me. I’m mostly bear when I’m in there these days, and that’s like being trapped inside a costume that’s wearing you, instead of the other way around. I’ve thought about trying to talk to Lexi—to explain—but aside from the fact that she doesn’t exactly speak bear I worry if I do say anything to her I’ll violate some kind of geas and end up stuck for good.”
Geas, thinks Tony. Like the one I have. We’re both trapped—iron fist in a velvet glove, is that how it goes?
“You want something, then.”
“Lexi’s already planning to kill Artio. She has your PEP. So … let her find me and take her shot. I think that’ll do it. She’ll feel like she did something good and right and avenged our father and then she can leave. Which she should do. She should go and see the real world before this fairy one gets its hooks in her. Once she does it, she’ll be shut out of this place for good, and that’s how things ought to be.”
Jim’s face softens. “And, you know, if you feel like seeing to it that she doesn’t end up alone and destitute on the street, I’ll take that as a personal favor.” He hikes up his shirt to reveal a long, ropy plasma burn. “After all, you owe me for this one.”
Tony grimaces. “Sorry, man. About shooting at you. About your sister—well—” he pauses. When they return to the woods it’s still going to be tough to walk to civilization, particularly if there’s a lot of heavy snow. They will need Lexi’s guidance. All he has to do is make sure she gets the bear and gets out. Throwing her a couple of bucks once they’re safe in town should be easy.
“You gonna promise me something in return?” He narrows his eyes.
Jim’s face darkens. “I’m not one of them. Never was. If you can’t do this with an open hand—because it’s the right thing to do—well, there’s not a lot of help for you. Neither one of us asked for a lot over the years. We were trapped in a place we didn’t ask to come to and made the best of it. At least one of us should get to see what’s on the other side of the exit door. What if she were your sister?”
Tony is already nodding. “Yeah,” he says, sorry that he never got to know Jim in the real world. Sure, he’s a pain in the ass the way Lexi is, but they might have been able to hoist a few cold ones together. And when Tony thinks about it, he’s happier that Jim has nothing to offer him. It’s a move the fey make—to give and take at the same time. Tony doesn’t want to be like that.
“What if she hesitates, though?” he asks. “Can’t pull the trigger at the right moment?”
“Then you should do it—only, shit, I guess you can’t. And neither of your charges are exactly mighty hunters.” He thinks a moment. “If it looks like she can’t do it—then tell her about a baby bird we found on the ground once. She’ll understand.”
Even Tony thinks he knows what that means. “Got it. But one last question.”
“I got nothing but time.”
“Isn’t Artio in hibernation right now?”
“Yeah, but it’ll be spring in a couple days.”
A bell goes off inside Tony. “We only landed in the woods about a week ago,” he says, but his words come out like toffee. He knows that to be true, but in this moment he also knows it to be false. He and T.J. have been in The Green Place for nearly a week.
Jim raises his one good eye’s brow. “You sure about that, man? Time’s a funny thing here. Winter is almost done.”
A Wild Test
When we were small, Jim and me used to wait until Daddy was asleep and then we’d zip our sleeping bags together into one big bag and then we’d be warm enough to zzz on the really cold nights. I don’t remember not being cold in wintertime but Jim said our first house, the one with mom and the baby in it, had heat where all you had to do was push a button and it came out of the floors and the walls.
I’m not sure how they do it. A big fire under the house? How come it doesn’t burn down? Anyway, it sounds like something you’d make up. Or something close to magic. Dofheicthe. Unseen. When I think about that, and what Gil taught me to do, and what Gillie showed Stef she could do, and what T.J. can do without anybody ever teaching him about it one way or the other, I think magic’s prolly about the way you see the world. Perception, that’s the word.
Which means my world is just as magic as The Green Place. In its own way.
“That makes a crazy kind of sense,” says T.J. when I xplain it.
“That’s how Gillie said it was to me,” says Stef. “We all came from the same source. But now we do our own kinds of magic.”
We sleep.
We are back in the real world, one that returned to winter while we were gone. Not sure how long passed here while we were in The Green Place, but it was enough time to snow hard again. Winter’s like that. Doesn’t want to give up. We come from The Green Place into the white place and all I can say is I’m glad it’s the repaired Glampsite because I am never going in that cave again, ever.
We get the genny grinding and make it warmish and we wrap blankets round ourselves and look at our hurts. The place on Stef’s hand where she cut it falling into the dark space started bleeding and my face turned burny and raw once we returned to the Glampsite. Whatever T.J. did to help in The Green Place doesn’t last too long in the woods, I guess.
So we pile snow on everything and that helps some but then we’re hurt and cold. T.J. tries singing to us but it doesn’t help the hurts this time, just makes Stef and me both feel funny so we tell him to quit it and he turns over in bed and won’t talk to us. Guess the queen was right: We only have little magics right now, right here. We’re just seedlings.
’Ventually we snooze together and I think of fox kits with their mama. It’s nice: T.J. is on one side of me and Stef on the other and they’re like bonfires, blazing with heat.
Morning comes and we eat all the oatmeal we can and its quiet with everybody thinking all kind of things. I’m thinking about Artio. But I’m pretty sure they’re not. So finally I speak up.
“I’m going hunting,” I say.
They both look at me. “We have to find Tony,” says T.J.
Same time, Stef says, “We gotta get out of the woods already.”
Almost makes me want to laugh, we’re thinking so different. The only things they want have zero to do with where we just were—almost like they don’t care anymore there’s a whole world on the other side of things that’s being eaten alive. I listened to Clíodhna and looked at the burned land in France on the other side of the cliff and I didn’t have any words. My heart hurt. I can’t stand the idea that things are vanishing for no reason. We could help, all of us.
After I find Artio, that is.
And see if I can do what needs doing.
But I’m thinking about Gil and how he and I didn’t get to have our talk. I suppose I will have to deal with him and what he knows ’ventually. But first, there is Artio, who will be un-hibernating any day now and needs to be found at the right time.
