3. Alone

Alone

I spent hours getting people out of the forest. Once it got light, and the storm cleared to a beautiful summer-blue sky, some of the braver people started helping me, but none of them could pull people out of trees the way I could. The forest wasn't growing as fast as it had before, though, and some people weren't trapped as thoroughly as Gina had been, and could be cut out before the bark closed over them again.

I'd seen that one man swallowed by stone, and I knew there had to be others, but the rock stubbornly refused to shift for me. I was sure the buried people were alive, though I couldn't have said why, and when we found the hand sticking out of the ground I knew I was right.

It was limp, but it was warm, and it had a slow, steady pulse. The man entombed in the stone was alive – unconscious, but alive – and since there was no way he was breathing, it had to be the Court keeping him that way.

I sat there for a while, holding his hand. I didn't know who he was. I couldn't recognize the hundreds of people who'd lived in the mining camp by their hands. But he was alive, and trapped, and the stone stubbornly refused to budge. Stone is used to holding treasures, I supposed. Why would a person be any different than an opal?

I didn't want to leave him to the mercy of predators, so before I moved on I spent some time building a cairn around his hand. Maybe someone would know what had happened. Maybe they could figure out how to get people out of the hungry earth. There was no reason for him to have his hand chewed off in the meantime.

Not everyone had survived—not even close. Whole buildings had been engulfed, or had collapsed. The outpost had burned to the ground, and the shantytown was charred and smashed to smithereens where it wasn't underground. Trees grew through almost all of it, their trunks marked with soot but completely undamaged.

Anyone standing directly over a growing tree had been impaled and effectively exploded by the rapid growth of the tree. I did what I could for them when I found them, arranging their bodies in the proper shape and saying a brief prayer over them, and hoped that Faery didn't have hungry ghosts.

One of them was the fae man who'd brought me here from the mortal world. I stared at his broken corpse, fighting back tears. I didn't give a shit about him – bastard had blood-bonded me patching me up from getting clawed up by one of the dancers at the bar I tended, with a playful, "promise to serve me for a thousand years and I'll clean up these scratches for you" – but he'd been my way back . He knew how to get to Long Beach. How to get me home .

Now I'd have to find another way.

I turned and looked north and a little west, and not for the first time. Something in that direction made me homesick, a quiet yearning that kept turning me towards it like a compass swinging north. Why? What was there?

How was I supposed to know? I didn't know shit about this Court. I didn't know shit about Courts . Whatever was happening seemed to be fixated on me, in a way that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and I had no idea what any of it meant.

The Court's responsiveness to me wasn't going unnoticed, either. People were giving me a wider and wider berth every time they encountered me, moving away from me as if whatever had interested the Court so much was contagious.

It hurt. I hadn't made any bosom friends in the months I'd been here, but we'd all been on the same side, blood-bonded mortals under the fae overseers, doing our best to survive. We'd been companions-in-arms, and now I was tainted.

Even the people I'd pulled out of trees looked at me like I was at fault. Especially them.

It wasn't only the mortals, either. The few fae who'd survived stayed well out of my way. They kept darting me looks like they thought I was going to flay them alive. None of them would look me in the face, let alone the eyes. I knew they had to know something about what had happened to me, but the one time I tried to approach one of them, he turned away from me and wouldn't even speak to me, his shoulders so tight I knew he was waiting for the blow to fall.

I didn't try again after that. It wasn't worth the attention—wasn't worth emphasizing the difference between me and everyone else. They already didn't want me here. I shouldn't give them more reasons to make me the enemy.

They got brave enough to tell me at nightfall. I noted bitterly that they'd waited until everyone that could be saved, had been, and until after I'd helped find enough supplies that everyone would be able to eat for at least a couple days. That everyone could turn on me so quickly didn't surprise me, but it could still go suck a bag of dicks.

Gina was their spokesperson. I guessed people figured I'd be less likely to do some sort of horrible Court-magic thing to my bunkmate and ostensible friend.

"So, um," she said, not looking me in the eyes. She had one arm wrapped around her chest, and a backpack dangling from her other hand. "We, um. Think you should go." Gina held out the pack to me.

I didn't take it. I fought to keep my expression serene and voice level. "Go where?" I asked. "We're in the middle of nowhere, and the sun's setting. It's going to be dark soon."

She had the grace to look ashamed. "I don't know," she whispered. She set the backpack down on the ground and took a step back. "Look, I really appreciated what you… did." Gina swallowed audibly. "But people are talking. Saying it's your fault. You know. Because you can…" She waved her hands like she was casting some sort of magic spell.

I did know.

"Say it," I said, my voice clipped.

She looked away. "You can talk to it. And it listens."

"Kill the witch?" The words came out sharp with bitterness.

"Come on, Q," Gina said, her shoulders slumping. "It's freaky. You're freaking people out. I made them put together some food and water and stuff for you, okay? So just go, before people decide to make you go."

The attention of the Court freaked me out, too, but I wasn't letting that stop me from helping them. Apparently that wasn't worth tolerance. It was worth a backpack with supplies, and nothing more.

I picked up the bag and slung it over my shoulder. It was heavy; something inside sloshed. A canteen, hopefully.

"Fine," I said. "Good luck, I guess."

"Yeah," she said, studying the ground. "Good luck."

It was getting dark, and I didn't want to be caught in the faery forest alone at night, but I didn't have a lot of options for holing up. We'd set up camp at the base of the cliffs, in the only open space nearby, so I couldn't stay here. The buildings down the hill and on the nearby outcropping were totally wrecked, to the point where staying in them was probably more dangerous than sleeping rough.

I had no fucking clue how to navigate a forest, let alone pull some Hatchet shit and survive in one. I'd spent my entire life in Long Beach, save for the seven months I'd spent in this hellhole.

It didn't matter. I couldn't stay here.

I turned on one heel and walked away from Gina, heading into the dark forest as if I knew what I was doing. It probably didn't help my reputation that I could do that. Striding confidently into the blackness of a forest was the sort of thing creepy monsters did in fairytales.

I couldn't have said how I knew I wouldn't walk into a tree or trip over a rock. I just wouldn't. My feet knew where to go.

Bitterly, I made my way back to the smashed remains of the outpost. My weird sense of the land around me was shattered where I'd fallen, as if I'd impacted something more than the ground, so it was easy to find.

The lockbox had broken open like an overripe fruit on the stone, spilling its guts across the ground. My hands seemed to know where to go without me telling them. I managed to dig up almost a dozen leather purses of coins. The leather was grown through with small roots and so fragile it tore in my hands, but the coins were still coins, silver and copper and a few gold. I used my canvas pack to wrap them up and shoved them into the one Gina had given me, trying not to let the anger devour me.

There had been opals in jars in the lockbox, too, now shattered and spilled across the ground and buried under the young soil and lush wildflowers. They didn't play nice with my sense of the world around me; everything seemed to shatter into brilliance around them, like crystals in the sunlight casting rainbows. It made me a little uncomfortable, but I knew the gems would be valuable for trade when I made it somewhere else with people. I dug for the biggest cluster of refraction and came away with a handful of high-class gemstones mixed with shards of glass.

The broken glass cut me. My injuries healed before they could even bleed.

I wrapped up the opals, too, and tucked them into the outside pocket of the pack. I had no idea what any of this meant, or what it might do to me. Maybe opals were poisonous now, or something. No reason to keep them in my pants pocket to find out.

Since I didn't have any actual destination, I figured I'd keep walking until it got too dark to navigate, or until I got tired. That would probably get me far enough from the scared people making me their scapegoat to keep them from finding me.

My path fell in line with the yearning sensation tugging me north. It was as good a direction as any other.

The forest grew darker. Nocturnal creatures started venturing out, their eerie cries hanging in the cool air of the mountain night. If I relaxed, I could feel them, all around me. Mice tunneled beneath leaf litter, the sensation of whiskers making my cheeks tingle and the taste of loam resting lightly on my tongue. Trees let out their long, slow exhale, leaves rustling in the same breeze the owls rode. Moths followed the intoxicating scent of sex, searching for their lovers, only to be caught in the sharp teeth of bats and the entangling strands of spiderwebs.

Deeper in the wilds, a pack of wargs howled, following the musk of something delicious. Saliva wet my mouth. We would hunt it, follow the trail it left, sink our ivory fangs deep into flesh seasoned with the sour salt-taste of fear—

I walked into a tree .

The jolt threw me back into my body. I panted, sweat breaking out over my whole body. "Don't take me," I whispered to the land all around me. My hands shook. "I've got people who need me. I can't be with you."

The Court didn't answer me.

I rested my forehead against the tree, taking meditative breaths. My mind automatically drifted to the faint sensation of a beating heart far to the north. It settled me, my heart falling into the same rhythm as I focused.

If I let my mind wander, I could picture the Court as if he was a man. He had been awake and aware, but now he was…

Sleeping , I thought. Dark lashes closed over dark eyes. Pointed fae ears piercing through tangled black hair, coarser and more matte-brown than my own shining blue-black strands. A powerful body, as rugged as the mountains, now lax in sleep, resting after the tidal wave of force that had healed what we'd broken.

The night breeze swept across my neck, the breath of the mountain chill on my bare skin. His breath would be warm, though—hot. A Court in the skin of a man, strength radiating off of him like heat, his touch as overwhelming as the power all around me.

I shook myself free of the image, a chill that had nothing to do with the night making me shiver. If the Court could catch me so easily when I was awake, what would happen when I slept? Would I be watching the world through the eyes of a warg, a mouse, an owl? Would I lose myself in the stillness of the trees, or in the endless movement of the wind?

What if I never woke up?

North, and a little west, the heart of the power all around me beat, a timeless throb that drew me to it like a moth to a flame. Whatever the Court had done to me, it was in me, and while that bothered me, I knew I wouldn't be alive without it.

I chewed on my lip. Going on some sort of hare-brained quest for the heart of a Court sounded like something out of myths and legends, but so did forests growing in the space of a heartbeat and trees releasing captives because I asked them to do it. It wasn't like I had any other direction to go, and if I wandered off blindly I'd probably walk in circles until I died of dehydration or got eaten by a warg.

Presuming the Court would allow me to be eaten by a warg. It hadn't let me die from falling forty feet onto rocks. Maybe I wouldn't be allowed to die at all.

Better not put it to the test, though, I thought with a sigh, refocusing on the world around me. That heartbeat felt far away. It was going to be a long trek.