Leave No Trace, page 31
“Nae,” says Gillie, sitting back in the snow, which disappears around her and becomes grass. “Ye knew the rules, Anthony: Hurt us an’ the wounds from Artio return. ’Tis what makes a geas—that it can never be ignored forever. A raking from Artio ’tis a fatal thing. Eventually.”
“So because he stopped Lexi from getting eaten by your bear—he’s—he’s going to die?” Stef stands and grabs at her hair. Tony knows that she doesn’t like him much, but it’s nice to hear she isn’t actively rejoicing right now.
The cold is seeping into him, so cold it’s almost warm.
“Get her here!” cries T.J. “Tell her it’s a mistake! Tell her I won’t ever, ever come back if she doesn’t fix him!”
Tony wants to rail at this. If he had the energy, he might. But trapped in his own mind, hardly able to concentrate anymore, he feels the truth of it in his heart. It isn’t a mistake. He has taken his own steps—steps not so different from Samuel’s—and they have walked him right to this place, this moment. He has listened to the wrong sort of people and believed them, on both sides of this war.
But everything he did was voluntary. He wanted something so badly he would do anything to get it, and that was always his choice. He only wishes he had another chance to see The Green Place. Jim might not have been able to stand it, but Tony knows he’s made of sterner stuff. He could do just fine over there.
Something turns in his mind.
T.J. is still wailing.
“Shut it,” Tony whispers to him. “It’s okay. I—I knew this might happen. But that wasn’t Jim. Jim didn’t go after you, Lexi. The bear took control.” He winces. “Ah, shit.”
“Can you at least make him not in pain?” Stef snaps. “Think you can be useful for once?”
Gillie glowers at her and grass falls in large clumps from her hat. “I can go, if ye like. Go entire.”
“Stop it,” says Lexi, voice thick and furious and full of tears. She leans closer to Tony. “You didn’t need to die. Not for me.”
“Didn’t do it … for you,” he says. “I’ve done … monstrous things. One good thing can’t negate that. I’ve killed so many sìthiche, they—they owe me.” He glances up at Gillie. “I’m sorry for shooting you.”
“Didnae hurt,” says Gillie, puffing her chest. “Much.”
Tony looks around at all of them. He wants this in the open. “Over in Brittany, I did … horrors. I shot every sìthiche I could come on. I’ve killed dozens. Maybe hundreds.”
Lexi makes a soft noise and Stef’s breath catches. T.J. is finally, blessedly, quiet.
“And,” prompts Gillie softly. “Tell of the pits.”
His breathing feels sharper now, more ragged. He wants to confess. He wants them to know what this war is like. What fear can do when it has a weapon in its hand. “You saw the battlefield,” he says. “You didn’t see the holes in the earth where they put the bodies. Once they’re shot we put them in the holes and cover them up. We light them on fire so they can’t reanimate with magic.” His voice weakens and trails off. “That’s—I can’t.” The queen fixed him inside and out, she said, and he understands what that means. The brainwashing his superiors put him through is gone, and that leaves him naked and aware of all of it. The memories burn worse than his injuries.
“Then I will tell,” says Gillie with no joy in her voice, just a flat, hard tone. “This one here put those of us that wisnae dead yet on the piles. An’ they couldnae escape. They were weak from the thumps. Then they started the fires. An’ the screams from the pits, they were music, aye?”
“The most terrible music I ever heard,” sighs Tony, opening his eyes. “We heard it in our bodies.” He remembers coming home from those days in the field covered in misshapen bruises; the music of the dying fae had left marks on him.
T.J. stares at him blankly. Stef is wiping her hands on her pants almost abstractedly, as if she has been coated in something unspeakable.
Tony feels lightness in his mind. He is thinking of trains, of journeys, of places without snow. “I tried,” he said. “To be better.”
“Aye,” says Gillie. “So ye did.” She looks around at Stef, T.J., and Lexi. “Set some of us free an’ tried to find the way home. But. ’Tis nae as easily done as that. All were found. All went to the pits.”
A tear rolls down Tony’s face. “There aren’t words for how sorry I am. Once, I wanted to help.”
Gillie stands, rubbing at her mouth, and walks in a circle. Her footsteps leave green paths in her wake. Even on ice, she makes things grow. After a moment, she returns to the ground. “Ye can say sorry, if ye like,” she says. “Or ye may be of help.”
Tony’s eyes go wide and he trembles inside.
“Ye have only ever wanted to live in my hame,” says Gillie. “ ’Tis true?”
“Always,” Tony whispers, thinking of the aperture that opened and showed him a new world.
“Will ye then yield? Artio’s an empty bear now an’ needs one like ye.”
Lexi gasps and holds Tony’s hand tighter.
“You don’t waste any time,” says T.J, his voice full of angry tears.
Tony nods. “Ah! Oh. Yes. Jesus, yes.” It is more than he expected and more than he deserves. He has been wrong all this time and that will sit on him until the day he, too, is released.
“Aye, then,” says Gillie, and removes a green wooden box from a pocket in her jacket. “ ’Tis agreed.”
Tony turns to T.J. “Will miss you, kid.” He looks at Stef. “Keep an eye on him. Or—don’t. Maybe he needs fewer eyes than we’ve put on him. Maybe he needs a chance to make some mistakes.”
Stef nods, and T.J. takes Tony’s free hand. “Be a better man than I’ve been,” he tells him, flicking his eyes over the others. “Not that it’ll be too tough.” He coughs once and opens his eyes to see Lexi bending over him.
“I’ll see you again,” she says. “You know how hard it is to stay away from The Green Place forever. I’ll find a way in.”
“Aye,” he says, and coughs long and hard; blood fills his mouth and he feels as if he’s drowning. His vision grays.
Gillie’s face hovers over him and is the last thing he sees. There is a tugging, a tearing and then something small and wispy drifts from Tony’s mouth into the small green box.
What is left of him lies quiet and still against the red snow for a time, until his heart finishes beating.
Natural Magic
The torch won’t catch fire.
The bear is coming and the pieces of what to do have assembled in Stef’s mind, but when she takes the branch meant for the fire and dips it in flame she keeps missing. She even jabs directly into the heart of the coals and it still won’t catch. She makes one last stabbing gesture, trying desperately to turn this useless piece of wood into a tool, a weapon—something that will save all of them—and then Artio is upon her.
She wakes, head buzzy. It takes a moment to realize none of that is true. There is no bear, no fire. She is surrounded by thin wooden walls in a structure that shakes gently from the wind outside.
Today, she thinks. They’ll be out of the woods today. Going home. Facing the music.
Wincing, she gets up on her knees and rolls down her pants to examine her thigh. An ice chunk struck her in the leg the night before when Artio leapt from the water and it has left a bit of swelling and a bruise. She set snow against the joint before falling asleep last night, so it could be worse. It also reminds her that unlike in the dream, there was a bear and a fire and a death last night. None of us escape unscathed, she thinks and quickly locates her notepad. She scribbles the lyric down. More pieces of an invisible puzzle assembling themselves.
My natural magic, she thinks, and writes that down too. Closing her eyes, she sees pictures and words and music intertwining. Wonders if they will fit in a song; people don’t sing much about magic anymore, even if they’re just being fanciful. It feels almost transgressive. If she can write lyrics, then for five more minutes she can hold back the memory of what happened to Tony. That is not a place she is ready to visit again, and she’s still unsure what really happened.
Last night after Gillie left with Artio, Lexi guided them to the ice shack where they piled together under a blanket. Stef was completely out of spoons for the day, to quote her mom’s favorite old memephrase. But sleep did not come immediately, and her mind refused to shut off.
“Love you,” T.J. murmured in his near sleep, and she took his hand.
She repeated the phrase back to him a few seconds later, out of habit. By then he was already unconscious. It is oddly freeing, and terrifying, to feel unbound to her heart this way. Imagining that she and T.J. were inevitable for so long made it easy to ignore everything the rest of the world offered her.
And now, what an entire other world offers them both.
We need one who can find the way, one who understands how to make the pieces into a whole, and one who can heal.
Three people. On a whole new hunt. A hunt for something called a uilebheist. The thing that is causing so much suffering. There’s a lot Stef doesn’t know, but it’s the not knowing that makes her tingle inside.
Stef sits in the quiet and writes more words for the man she loves but is not in love with to sing someday, and hears a muffled hacking cut through the morning air. It goes on, pauses, turns into a noise she cannot define, then resumes. For the first time, she glances around the tiny interior of the shack and realizes she is alone. Piling on another layer of clothing and her coat, Stef steps into the world, following recent footprints in the snow. Down by the lakeside Lexi and T.J. are pulling apart the lean-to and lashing together thick tree branches with the tent cord they used while walking across the lake yesterday.
Stef rubs her eyes in surprise: T.J. is doing manual labor.
She looks closer. Between the tree branch frame they have stretched a blanket and several pine boughs, tying them on securely. Then she gets it.
“A sled,” she says, walking up to them. “You’re making a sled.”
T.J. blinks up at her. “Hey,” he says absently. “We have to carry him out somehow.”
Stef swallows. The other thing they did before collapsing into sleep after Gillie departed was to use Tony’s sleeping bag as a shroud, zipping him in and covering his face. Overnight, his body rested outside of the shack and could probably remain there for some time, preserved by the cold.
She isn’t sure how to feel about Tony, or the loss of him. He gave them the world, but only under his conditions. He kept them sheltered—but also protected. He was their shield against danger, but ultimately he was the most dangerous person she’d ever met. The things he said before succumbing are going to stick in her head forever. Terrible things from someone who, in the end, recognized his own terribleness.
“We can send someone back,” suggests Stef. “Won’t it really ….” She knows how it sounds and is too tired to care anymore. “Won’t it really slow us up?”
“We’ll pull if you don’t want to,” says Lexi. Wind ruffles her hair, sending it spiraling in several directions. She looks like a witch of the lake, intense and pale, jewels of snow encrusting her eyelashes and brows. T.J. is also changed, face pink and shining, hair frozen into strange points and directions. Stef hasn’t seen it herself, but she now knows she has a streak of white in her hair, a bit of snow embedded into her person. In this moment, they are all otherworldly beings folded out of winter, breathing steam into the chill air.
“No,” says Stef. “We’ll all pull.”
T.J. nods, and she joins them in finishing the sled.
“And … then what?” she asks after a while.
“We walk,” says Lexi. “ I get you to the road and—”
“And?”
Lexi doesn’t finish the sentence.
“What do you want to happen next, Lexi?”
She continues tying off the ends of the stretcher. “Don’t know what I want anymore.”
“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen,” says Stef, and waits until she meets her gaze. “We take one day, then the next day. We get into whatever bumfuck little town you’re walking us to. We rent rooms. We take baths. We eat dinner. We call our parents, maybe the lawyer.”
“But that’s not what has to happen,” says T.J.
Stef thinks about the Peppie she remade the night before. How it seemed destined to be one thing forever, then showed her how it could be another.
They fall into silence again as the forest groans around them, snow sliding from branches, ice settling. The noises are clear to her in ways she could not have expected five months ago. She is ready to leave the forest—she has a crusty, itchy feeling all over and has been dreaming of a hot bath and getting her hair looked at and a gooey slice of pizza—but those things feel like they belong to another person. She finds herself looking over her shoulder more than once, searching the trees, looking for a stand of birches. The fact is, the adventure she has been seeking is here, with T.J., with Lexi, with Gil and Gillie. With The Green Place and the battles that are to come.
Lexi pauses, wipes her upper lip. “Can you—be shine-o-la with me?”
“Shinola?” She remembers a thing a friend’s grandpa used to say: He don’t know shit from Shinola, and when Stef thinks a little harder she recalls how Shinola was some kind of shoe cleaner or something.
“Jim always said Daddy was sometimes fulla shit, and sometimes full of shine-o-la,” says Lexi. “He was always fulla somethin’.”
“I bet he was,” says Stef. “So you want me to be … honest with you, is that it?”
“Yes. Be true.”
She nods. “What do you want to know?”
Lexi sticks her hatchet down in the snow. “You and T.J. keep telling me about what happens when I walk out with you. You always say how great it is. But you also make it sound like it’s the scariest place in the world. So. Tell me if I can make it out there.”
Stef hears the young woman’s fear. She thinks about being a person who has grown up with the sounds of the forest and the voices of her father and brother and Gil—and how all of them are gone now, except the magical being most people wouldn’t even believe existed. About what it might be like to step from a quiet, knowable place into a typhoon. T.J.’s world is extraordinary even for those who live it; tossing a person like Lexi into that chaos with no warning feels wrong.
Behind that, Stef thinks for the first time about what it means to promise safety and protection to Lexi. She’s a grown person but she’s also a child. She knows how to start a fire but not a stove. She can sleep on the snow but doesn’t know what a box spring is. To her, clouds aren’t storage space; they’re just weather. She hasn’t been around more than a handful of people at a time for nearly ten years. The awesome responsibility settles on Stef’s shoulders like snow.
We are so not the right people to do this.
Yet another part of her wants to try. With money and time and insistence on privacy—she can be my personal assistant! Nobody pays attention to those folks—they can make this work. Stef can make it work. She wants to believe this. So the best she can do for Lexi is to say what’s in her heart with the limited knowledge she has, and believe it can be enough.
“Yes,” says Stef, hoping it is not a lie she’s telling herself. “You will. ’Cause you’ll have us. And ’cause you’re you. You know the way. And I know how to make things work.”
T.J. has been watching them quietly; there’s a sadness in his eyes Stef has not seen before. “But why would you want to?”
The day has a dreamlike quality that reminds Stef of her first step into the wilderness, bouncing out of that helicopter, unable to catch her breath. Everything is sharp and absolute and clear to her now: There is magic in the world, they have seen death, they have lived among the wild things of the forest, they have lost friends. Or at least cohorts.
Her thoughts bounce between concern for T.J., who is quiet and interior in a way she has never known as he pulls the sled with Tony in it, and anticipation for Lexi. She feels as if she has taken on a hard, welcome burden. It is real, at least—unlike their life of celebrity. That has been the strangest thing of all, to discover that she is capable of expansion, of becoming new all over again. She is not afraid. The hyperawareness she felt on arriving in the woods feels permanent. She has never been so awake.
The day comes full-on and they trudge through it. They come to a point where the trees are spaced further apart, and the forest becomes merely a wood, with a thicket here and there. It is a different place they have walked to now, a foreign place. The quality of light thins and wanes; the steady chill in the air grows harsher. It will be a cold, wicked night if they spend it outside.
“Can’t be much further,” says T.J.
Stef nods. “Man, I’m ready for a hot bath. And real food.”
No one contradicts her.
Abruptly, Lexi comes to life, halting and scanning the brush and trees.
High above them, a bird circles and catches the breeze, a dark spot gliding against the indigo sky. They set Tony down and Lexi ventures a few feet into the brush, holds out her hands and waits. The trees appear to vibrate and Stef hears a low, musical hum. Lexi jerks around and gestures forward, rubbing at her temples. “This way.”
They can’t run with the sled but they go as fast as their burden and the terrain allows. The wind bites into Stef’s lungs, the absolute power of the moment holding them fast. And then—suddenly—there it is. A trail. Not the faint spaces they have hacked and trod through over the past several days but a true two-person-wide trail.
“We are found,” says Stef.
They stand side by side, glancing down the snow-covered path. A slight hint of tarmac peeps through the trees.
