Chapter Twenty-Eight

I was floating again, in the place without feeling or sight. I was sense without sensation, aware of nothing. I was too numb with shock to be afraid. Questions of where and how slunk around the borders of my consciousness and died unanswered.

Gradually, there was warmth, and I knew my body’s shape again by the spread of pins and needles pinching away the numbness. I was on my back staring upward into imperfect blackness, a night sky made strange by too many stars. Great shapes framed the edges of my vision, towering trees without leaf or limb, dead pillars of timber. The light of the stars was distant and cold, but only a few feet from where I lay was the crackling, healthy glow of a small fire.

My head rested on a water bottle, which was probably better than nothing, but hardly comfortable. I sat up and saw we were surrounded by a disconcertingly thick bank of fog. It was not misty in the near vicinity, but impenetrable in the distance. The circle of light made by the fire was clear; beyond it was a solid wall of grey. There was no gradual change, but a distinct border.

“Li?” I said. His back was to me. He stood confronting the fog, giving the impression that he could see much farther than I could, but he was at my side in an instant, a supporting hand behind my shoulder.

“Are you all right?” He asked at the same moment as I sighed with relief, “You’re okay.” He blinked and smiled, kneeling beside me.

“I can heal myself, as long as I am not being attacked, anyway.” His grin became a grimace. “I am tired and worn out, but otherwise unharmed.”

I thought of the crater he had been lying in, bleeding, and had to shake my head to dispel the image. It’s over, I chided myself. He’s safe. Yet I couldn’t forget the sense of hopelessness that had come over me when I saw him that way, the loss.

“How do you feel?” he asked with genuine concern. “I can help if you are hurt, but I couldn’t try it without your permission.”

“I’m fine,” I lied. I had a lot of unusual aches, but there was nothing that felt like it wouldn’t get better on its own. As for the echoes of my mental anguish, that was something I wouldn’t want him to touch even if he could. I needed to remember.

“How did we get here?” Images flickered alongside the firelight: the hospital, the nurse, Milton. After I saw Li hurt, there were gaps and it became less clear. I had only fuzzy intimations, like the edges of a dream unfinished. I knew that I had overpowered Milton, but I didn’t know how.

“I brought us,” Li answered, moving to settle on the other face of the fire, “after you… calmed.”

Why had he moved away?

“Do you understand what happened?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” I answered truthfully, but I definitely had an idea. “My Shadow came?”

He nodded. I shivered, though I was far from cold.

“Does that make me different now? You said there was no going back. Am I changed? Is that why you moved away?” Anxiety fluttered in my chest, he was far too long in responding.

“No.” His eyes were deeper than I could guess, violet eternities. “The Shadow doesn’t have you yet. It is stronger than it was, but not strong enough for that.”

Yet, he said. Yet, meaning I was a lost cause.

“It won’t be,” he continued, “until you wear the dragons shape. At that point; either you will belong to it, like your mother belongs to hers, or it will belong to you.”

It took a long time for the ramifications of this to sink in. A stick collapsed as the fire burned, dimming it slightly. The fog swirled around us, claiming another inch of ground.

“I can learn to control it.”

He was reluctant in his agreement, giving an almost imperceptible nod. “It’s possible. It’s what all Cariads do to one extent or another. You make a half into a whole.”

An idea bubbled up, a new way to see him. “You have it too, don’t you? You’re a Cariad like I am.” It was obvious, yet it had never occurred to me before. Li seemed so complete in himself, so aloof, it was hard to imagine him once facing the same problems I was. Still, the unicorn was separate from Li the same way the dragon was separate from me.

Li’s expression was pained. “Yes, but our Shadows are not the same. I did not have to fight the way you will have to fight.” It was part apology. “We all change when the blood awakens, but the Wyrm is the most virulent of all the lines. It is a sort of madness.”

“But it can be done.” Why was he trying to take away my hope? Why was he trying to prepare me for failure? “I can survive it.”

That pained look again, and sadness too. “I would not be here if I did not believe you could be more than another Malice. I have to believe in you, Abigail.”

Why did it sound like he was talking about something he wouldn’t be around to help me with? It wasn’t what he said exactly, but a quality in his voice that suggested it.

Then he changed the subject. “Abigail, would you like to know where you are?”

This, admittedly, was a pretty good question. I had been so worried about the events in the hospital that I hadn’t begun to contemplate what we were going to do now that we were out of it, or where we had gotten out of it to.

I glanced about and saw nothing but fog, towering trees and a multitude of stars. Wait, were those stars moving?

“Actually,” I said, “I am a little curious, now that you mention it.” They were moving. Slowly, like a lazy school of impossible fish, they swam across the night.

“This place is called Mori,” Li said. “It belongs to the Fae, but not like those you freed. These are more like the Naiad.” He paused, remembering. “Though not much like her either.”

Mori. What about its shroud?

The more I looked at it, the more distressing the fog became. It reminded me of a living creature pressed bodily against a barrier, a creature that smelled food.

“Is it safe here?”

“It is not safe anywhere,” Li said seriously, “but Malice cannot follow the way we came. That will protect us for a while.”

Protected for a while; that was better than nothing, but were we safe from me? I could still feel my Shadow, a bundle of loathing and insatiable desire, but it was not fighting me. It seemed smaller, like a cyst that had been lanced and partially drained. How long before it came back stronger than before? It had saved us this time, but what about the next? Li said he believed in me, but he also made it sound like I was in danger of losing myself at any time. Maybe I was.

“How did you bring us here?” I asked. “The last part I remember. It didn’t look easy, especially the way you were hurt.” I cringed, seeing him lying there again, by all appearances as good as dead. If he could heal himself after that, I doubted there was anything he couldn’t heal.

He shrugged, as if to him, it wasn’t important. “I took the Mirror Roads. If you know them well enough you can take them anywhere, to any world, though no one knows them as well as that anymore.” He must have seen my confusion, because he went on. “It is like going Sideways,” he said. “Another Faerie trick. The Mirror Roads are like little threads that connect everything in the universe, bind them all into a single pattern. Some places, Faerie places, sometimes have no doors at all except for these threads. That’s why Mori is safe from Malice. She is too heavy to travel the Roads. They shatter beneath her.”

I’m not sure if this exposition left me more confused or less.

“Heavy?”

Li’s face pinched. “Not her weight. They are not actually roads, or strands, or threads for that matter. It’s only a way to visualize them. Malice has more energy than the single connections can handle. She would burst them at the seams and become lost in the nothing of between worlds, or be dropped somewhere she had no way of getting back from.”

“Oh,” I said. The fire did seem to be getting awfully low, and there wasn’t much in the way of kindling on the ground nearby. There was still plenty of clean space between the fog and myself, but it was creeping inexorably closer. I didn’t want to find out what would happen when the fire went out.

“So what are we going to do?”

Li stood, white skin shining in the light of the flames, looking everything the hero that I wasn’t. Maybe it was his story, I thought, and I was only a sidekick.

“We are going to ask for help from the Fae Queen, Arice.” He said it like it was the last on a long list of unthinkable options. Telling me her name made him look almost… embarrassed? What could that be about?

“Wait here. I’ll be right back.” He turned, and as he did he changed. The boy prince was only a purple after image as the unicorn trotted to the fog, head bent down as if intending to charge. The grey bank parted like double doors, folding in on itself to let him pass, and then closing behind him. There were only further mists beyond.

“What?” I rose, stuffing my water bottle in my back pocket, and then crossing my arms over my chest. I was not at all comfortable being left alone in the ever so gradually diminishing circle of firelight, the fog free zone. I wasn’t about to go running after him either. I stood there impatient and anxious, for I don’t know how many minutes, until I saw a black line materialize in the grey. It was his horn, a reverse beacon, visible ahead of him.

Soon again the fog parted, revealing a delicate, white horse with a long dark mane and a spear of neverness upon its brow. In its mouth it carried two stout branches somewhat awkwardly, like a dog sent to fetch.

As soon as he entered the radius of the firelight he returned to human shape, the branches transported from mouth to hand in a manner that I couldn’t make sense of, like they had been there all along.

“We need torches,” he said, “if we are going to travel the mists.”

I stared past him into the newly re-solidified wall of hungry, swirling, gray. It looked… eager. “Awesome,” I said blandly.

I was about to tell him that ordinary branches wouldn’t work very well as torches; that we needed some kind of fuel or wrap to keep the fire burning at the top of the branch for a reasonable amount of time. Then he knelt by the fire, which was less than impressive by this juncture, and began to whisper to it, which froze my lecture. Oh yes, magic.

If I strained, I could almost make out words in what he said, but for the most part it only sounded like wind battering a cloth. He held the branches over the small flames, above them, not in them, and for a moment nothing happened.

Then the fire sort of curled, stretching to ensnare the two stout sticks and then pulling the rest of itself up on to them like a pure energy slinky. Li held them aloft, two branches with red gold crowns churning merrily away, hardly even charring the wood.

We had torches.

He handed one to me with a smile. “They won’t last forever,” he said, “but they shouldn’t have to.”

The fog had taken this opportunity to press in closer, not much farther out than I could reach with my hand. But now the whirling wisps and tendrils seemed more wary. We didn’t have only a shield now, we had swords.

I wished mine was bigger.

“Did you use a magic language,” I asked, “or was that another thing the Fae taught you?”

Li tilted his head considering, violet eyes searching through a distant past, then he shrugged.

“Who knows,” he said, and walked confidently off into the fog. It parted for the flame, closing behind him in a rush.

My circle of safety was suddenly very fragile and very small.

“Li!” I shouted, and hurried after him into Mori.

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