2. Reforestation

Reforestation

N othing could have prepared me for the sensation of Faery opening its eyes. For one heart-stopping moment, I could have sworn I was staring into the terrified eyes of a man, dark irises inseparable from the black of his pupils.

I knew those eyes. Knew him —had always known him.

The world rushed into me like a tidal wave, not with looming force, but with the implacable destruction of the ocean coming ashore. I was a wall made of dead wood—flames laughing with victory as they clawed at the sky—the rotting roots of a thousand trees slaughtered for profit—terrified sparks of life in tombs of wood—sprawling beautiful landscape—gouges clawed in my stone to tear out my guts—

I was in agony .

And I was falling.

The falling tore my mind free from the pain of the land around me. I only had enough time to recognize that I was midair before I hit the ground. I broke – I felt myself break, my skull cracking against stone and my arm and ribs and hip impacting the ground behind it – but it didn't hurt, and I didn't die. I staggered to my feet before I could comprehend what I was doing, rain lashing me and blood streaking my skin, and I didn't hurt .

My lungs moved smoothly. No burns heated my skin. Faery clamored for my attention, every rock and tree and gleaming, sparkling opal, but I tore my mind away, my focus on the terror of the now.

Stone and people screamed from inside the walls of the shantytown. I ran for them. The ground moved under me, and I moved with it, the earth itself telling me where to go. Green life burst through broken stone, sprouts growing from seedling to sapling to tree in moments. Soil boiled up under my feet, as if an army of worms and fungus tilled the ground beneath me. My every footstep landed perfectly, hitting earth instead of trees .

I broke free of the growing forest at the base of the outpost, outrunning the pace of the plants, and leapt back into the chaos of the shantytown. The incredible roar of the shifting earth drowned out the shrillness of human terror.

I grabbed one woman by the arm and yanked her free of the shifting stone moments before it engulfed her, fear lending me inhuman strength. I felt her elbow dislocate—decided not to care—flung her bodily away from the broken earth onto a patch of land that had once been meadow, not forest.

Need drove me back into the chaos, somehow keeping my balance when I saw people crawling and sliding on the stone slope, trying to get out of the shantytown as walls heaved and stone grew like expanding foam. A man clawed for purchase, his legs encased in rock, and was swallowed whole. I shoved another man away moments before a tree speared up through the newborn soil; hooked my arm under a catatonic teenager's shoulder and hauled her bodily away from the forest before plants could grow through her.

Sudden silence.

I stood, swaying, my whole body covered in sweat and dirt. The silence lasted only a heartbeat before the screams began again.

The imposing dark of the forest loomed. Rain came down, cold and unforgiving, slowing as the heart of the storm passed us. I couldn't even see the outcropping on which the outpost stood, only the glow of the fire beyond the trees. The landslide that had revealed the opal dirt beneath might as well have never existed. The cliffs stood in their stark beauty, untouched by man. The primeval forest stretched endlessly through the mountains.

There were people in there. They kept screaming.

I swallowed, fear making my hands shake. I took one step forward, and someone grabbed me by the arm.

"You can't go in there," the man said, terror making the whites of his eyes show all around, catching the predawn light. "You'll die—"

I shook my arm free. "People are hurt in there." And I wouldn't die. The Court had saved me. If I hadn't died on stone, I wouldn't die on forest loam. But I couldn't say that, not without sounding insane.

I could still see Faery's eyes in my mind. Dark, dense lashes parting to reveal irises as black as mine, endless wells of ink, a gaze met not with the unknowingness of a stranger, nor a jolt of recognition, but as if they were eyes I'd looked into every day of my life.

The man didn't try to stop me when I stepped forward again. I swallowed and put my hand on one of the newborn trees.

"Great spirit, will you listen to me?" I asked in Vietnamese. "You saved me. Helped me. Will you let me help the people caught in your forest?"

I knew the force that had changed the land could understand my tongues of birth. Of course it could. I could feel it inside me, like roots had grown into my soul .

Maybe that was stupid. What did I know about magic? Maybe it couldn't hear me at all. I wasn't a particularly dedicated practitioner of religion, and I didn't know shit about Faery. The fae weren't that interested in giving their slaves lessons about their culture, and none of us had possessed much of a desire to listen, anyway. We wanted out , not to learn how to assimilate.

I wracked my brain, trying to remember the things Auntie and Bà had taught me about ghosts and spirits, which was the closest thing to information I had. Vietnam wasn't Faery, but these worlds were connected. Maybe the old religions all knew the truth, somewhere far in the past: there was another world, and it was inhabited by things far stranger than us mere mortals.

Bà would have been so much better at this. I had no idea how to propitiate a faery spirit, let alone a faery Court. I didn't have any food or alcohol, or even a paper representation to burn. Blood, maybe?

But, no. It had healed me—every part of me. I was breathing easily, not even tired, with only the scent of smoke and burned hair lingering on me as proof that I'd been in that building at all.

All my skin felt hypersensitized, the adrenaline pounding through me making me tremble. The forest was still too dark to see, but I didn't think that would matter. Faery was alive , and if I closed my eyes, it pressed into me, the knowledge of a world that spread far beyond the small circle of land I'd grown familiar with.

I stood, and gave the forest a deep bow. It would let me in, or it wouldn't. If it didn't… well, I should be dead, anyway. Maybe in my next life, I could do better than I had this time.

Eyes closed, I stepped into the black of the forest.

Faery swallowed me whole. I could feel it, all around me, hungry and aware. Trees stretched their roots ever deeper and branches ever higher. Stone slumbered underfoot, ancient and inviolable. Small creatures crept out of hiding. To my right, a songbird lifted his voice in defiance of the night, singing to flame instead of the sun. To my left, a woman sobbed, trapped by a tree.

I walked towards her. The tree had grown around her, swallowing her like the mine had swallowed people, or like a tree eating the wire of a chain-link fence. She had one arm and her shoulders free, and one foot protruding from the bark.

"Gina," I whispered, recognizing my bunkmate by the bright pink hair plastered to her pale skin by the rain.

She picked her head up with the exhaustion of a dog beaten half to death. "Q?" she asked, her voice wavering.

My mouth pressed into a flat line. I hated being called by my initial instead of my name. It wasn't as if "Quyen" was a hard name to say. I much preferred hearing Luke say "Kwahn" with exaggerated care than getting called "Q." At least he was trying .

I didn't reprimand her, though. She'd been eaten by a tree.

"Yeah, it's me," I said, stepping closer. I had no idea how to help her. My belt-knife wasn't nearly big enough to hack through a tree, and I suspected that taking steel to this particular forest was a very, very bad idea.

I came over, though, and put my hand on the tree, closing my eyes to see if the spirit of the Court would talk to me. A sense of discomfort settled in my gut, as if I'd eaten something off. Trees weren't meant to have people in them any more than they were meant to have chain-link fences in them. It was doing its best, growing around the thing inside it, but Gina's presence was like a tumor, or a cyst.

"What are you doing?" she asked, sounding like she was on the verge of crying again. "You have to cut me out. You have to—"

"Shh," I said, frowning as I tried to listen. "I'm thinking."

Gina whimpered like an injured puppy, hanging there, trapped.

Not a knife , I thought, my brows pulling together. The forest still seemed to respond to me, though. The tree almost leaned into me, listening to me, a gentle sort of focus. Maybe my hands.

"Listen to me, Gina," I said, trying to sound soothing. "The Court is awake, okay? It woke up. I don't know why. I think it's falling asleep again? Or… I don't know. But it's still listening, and I'm going to try to talk to it."

"Is that some kind of… Asian magic?" she asked, half-whimpering the words.

I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. I ought to just leave her here. That would serve her right.

I remembered Auntie telling me, one of the many times I got frustrated with dealing with some asshole or another, "If helping the ignorant was easy, everyone would be a buddha." Gina wasn't an asshole. She was a spoiled rich white girl who'd gotten picked up wandering home drunk from a frat party, agreeing to go home with the hot guy she'd met and do anything he told her to do. Nobody had ever bothered to teach her how to be a decent person.

"I think it's faery magic," I said, when I could keep the irritation out of my voice. "I want you to lean forward, okay?"

"Okay," she said, her voice shaking. "Just… just get me out of here, Q."

I crouched in front of her. "Yeah," I said, absently, focusing not on her but on the tree. "Spirit," I murmured softly, using Vietnamese again. It had worked before. "Let me remove the thorn in your side."

There was no way for me to tell if it was listening. That first, overwhelming wave of knowledge and connection had ebbed, and what remained felt tenuous. Distant, maybe. It tugged to the north, and a little west, as if my heart beat outside of my chest, far in the distance.

"Lean forward," I told Gina.

She jerked her head up and down.

That was good enough for me. I ran my fingers down along the burl of the tree like I was undressing a man, sliding my fingertips underneath the hem of his robe. A knot of tension came undone in my chest, the pain of my beating heart easing. The bark parted underneath my fingertips.

Gina started hyperventilating. I ignored her, focusing on that feeling of relaxation—of ease. That's my good boy , I thought, a strange thought, because the statue in the little shrine where the fae left offerings was a goddess figure. But the being under my hands felt distinctly masculine, a knowledge so deep-seated there was no questioning it.

My fingertips traced down through the grown-together bark, and it opened for me. Relief spilled into me as Gina staggered forward and collapsed on the ground. She curled into the fetal position, whispering "oh my god, oh my god, oh my god" over and over again, shivering as the rain wet her exposed skin. Nothing of her clothing remained but what had been outside the tree. Everything else had been shredded.

The tree slowly started closing, bark growing over naked, exposed wood. I bowed to it, hand starting to shake again. This was— This was too much. I couldn't do this—

Then who else will? I asked myself, closing my eyes and trying to meditate for a moment. The Court was listening to me. I didn't think it necessarily liked me, but it felt inescapable, as if some piece of it had grown roots into me, or gotten lodged in my soul. Had that happened on the wall? When I'd hit the ground, and it had healed me even while I was breaking on its stone?

It didn't matter. I could help the people in the woods, and I didn't think anyone else could. It had to be me.

I didn't have anything else, so I gave Gina my soot-smeared, burned overshirt to tie around her hips in an awkward diaper, so at least she wouldn't be naked, and I led her out of the forest to the open ground around the opal cliffs.

People looked at me like I was some sort of freak, or leper. I didn't say anything to them. I just handed off Gina, shaking and crying, to the first person I saw, then turned around and walked back into the dark forest.