Chapter 4

  The future teaches you to be alone,

  The present to be afraid and cold.

  - Manic Street Preachers, “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next”

  Anthea walked in the rain and in the sun, through smoke and storm, beneath windy skies and calm, leaving her footprints on grass and sand and snow. Days and days passed uncounted, while the bright clouds schooled and scurried overhead, while the moons shuttled in their orbit unceasing by day and by night, while empyreal stars fell in the dark. She did not see any of this, for she never looked up.

  Sometimes she cut down a monster with a sword that loved vengeance and a scythe that loved the sky. She ate when hunger compelled her. She drank when necessary heedless of the source of her water. She slept when she could walk no further.

  Her series of steps, for it was this and not a journey, took her into the northern reaches. Here the cloudlight shone cold and pale, and auroras danced in the dark among the silver clouds, and the rings of the planet—orange, blue, green, yellow—glittered in sweeping arcs over the southern sky. The light of the rings and the auroras and the stars made the snow and ice glow with luminescence even when the clouds flickered far off on the dim horizons.

  To all of this Anthea was blind, but she felt the bite of the cold wind, and she wrapped her tattered cloak about her with a trembling hand. She knew weariness bone-deep, and a sickness made her cough in painful heaves that burned in her chest. Still she trudged on, step by step, aimless as the wind and equally unmindful.

  She came to the roots of a tree, which grew there among the chill rock and the gleaming ice, and there was yet that within her to stop and marvel at the sight of it. It coiled upon itself, mounting up and up into the dark heights so that it seemed the auroras were curtains hung from its highest branches. Glaciers nestled among its roots, and sharp mountain peaks stood guard around it. But the deep amber of its ancient, furrowed bark ran dull and dead, and no leaves marked its heaven-spread boughs.

  Anthea wondered that she had not known of such a place as this.

  A light broke out upon the tree as she watched, as though dawn spread its burning rays from the south, born from the rage and fires of a true star. Anthea’s shadow drew itself in the rock and ice before her, traced from her body by a brilliant light. The sound of pages turning, like colossal doors of solid metal slamming shut, shivered through her and broke avalanches off of the nearby slopes. She felt a heat on her back, but she refused to turn. She would not look at the Burning Books. She would not.

  Terror weakened her; she collapsed upon the snow. Shivering and cold, afraid and alone, she closed her eyes and let unconsciousness wash over her.

  The darkness of sleep was unkind to Anthea, for it was full of restless dreams and painful memories. In her dreams she remembered that she had once been unafraid of the sky. She had once been able to play the wind, to understand clouds and music and beauty and love.

  She awoke in pieces: first, the heat. Her body burned, and pain stabbed at her chest. She could hardly move. Next the smell: thick, earthy smoke, and a humid green smell from the soft lumpy bed on which she lay. Then the song: soft and still, cold and distant as the skies, crooned in a girl’s voice in a language unknown. The song coaxed Anthea’s consciousness up out of the mire of troubled sleep. It made her shiver, and she opened her eyes.

  Roots twined above her, lit by a smoldering peat fire that warmed her on one side. She had lush green moss for a bed and a stiff fibrous sheet of woven reeds for a blanket. Her hair had been cleaned and plaited into a thick braid. The sight of it brought tears to her eyes and made her cough painfully.

  Strands of shining threads, like spider-silk, lay all over her. They trailed together to Anthea’s left, to the dark opening of the root-walled hollow in which she lay. A leaf was there—slim, pearlescent white, half the size of Anthea. It sat at the entrance, and the spider-silk threads grew from it like thick hair, and it was the source of the soft song. So strange and confusing was this sight that Anthea wondered whether it was a fever dream. But the leaf, as though sensing Anthea’s gaze upon it, ceased its song. It turned and looked back at Anthea with wide opal eyes that glimmered iridescent in the firelight.

  Anthea opened her mouth, intending to croak out a question, but even this effort was too much. She convulsed; her body heaved; she vomited onto the moss and onto her own clean milk-white braid of hair. Darkness flooded her vision. She felt small cool hands on her face, tasted something very bitter wash down her throat, and fell back into the dark of sleep—though this time, there were no dreams.

  When next she awoke, it was much the same as before: the fire, the moss, the roots. But the leaf was watching her, perched on a rock nearby, and now Anthea thought that her eyes had played a trick on her before, for this girl was not so much like a leaf at all. Her skin was smooth and unblemished, pearly white, and hints of colors played there in the flickering firelight. Her great length of hair, as fine and colorless as spider-thread, cascaded down around her and the rock she crouched on like a liquid fall of iridescent cloud. Her shining eyes were odd, everything about her was odd, but Anthea sensed no danger from her.

  They watched each other for a while, and then the girl spoke in a melodious whisper. “My name is Aisling, and I know yours, little bird: it is Anthea.”

  Anthea opened her mouth to respond, but the girl, Aisling, shook her head sharply in a quick motion that rippled her lustrous fall of hair. She hopped off the rock, darted to the fire and then to Anthea, all in a quick and fluid motion that left a trail of shimmering hair adrift in the smoky air behind her. She held a small earthenware mug to Anthea’s lips. Anthea allowed the bitter drink to slide down her throat. She coughed a little, winced in pain.

  “Drink this, little bird, cool rain for your burning blood; clouds should never burn.” The girl tilted another, larger cup for Anthea to drink, and this time it was only water, cold and sweet. Anthea wanted more when it was empty, but the girl shook her head. She peered into Anthea’s eyes. Her own were strange: large dark pupils in a setting of shining opal, veined with starlight.

  Anthea fell asleep again.

  When next she awoke, she was fiercely hungry. The girl named Aisling seemed to know this without being told, for she appeared almost at once with a bowl of soup. The smell of it was so delicious that it nauseated Anthea; she nearly threw up again. Aisling leaned Anthea against the mossy root walls of the hollow and fed her spoonfuls of the soup; Anthea was nearly too weak to lift her arms. It was a vegetable soup of roots and tubers and small crunchy bits that Anthea took to be snails or insects. She ate all of it without question.

  Aisling hummed to herself softly as she fed Anthea, a tuneless drone that seemed to resonate strangely in the fire and the hazy air and even the roots at Anthea’s back. Sometimes she spoke to herself, murmured sentences that wove themselves nearly into the song. “Your wings, little bird, dreams of eagles on the dawn—why have you clipped them?”

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  When Anthea had eaten as much soup as she could take, the girl darted to the entrance of the hollow, beyond which lay the dim ethereal gloom of the almost-night, and set the clay bowl and spoon carefully by the entrance.

  Anthea, her strength revived by the meal, looked more closely about her. The fire, a smoldering pile of neatly cut peat, warmed her, though she by turns sweated with overheat and shivered with chills. A cooking pot and a small assortment of crudely fashioned clay cookware rested near the fire. Across from Anthea lay a pile of cut peat squares, and there among them, discarded like a plain tool no longer in use, lay Nemesis. Anthea had never seen it caked in mud, its edge not gleaming with fire.

  Anthea felt a faint rush of cold air, and suddenly Aisling was beside her, the girl’s bright opal eyes on the sword. “It’s furious sharp,” she whispered to Anthea, her words sounding like the beginning of a song. She flickered over to the sword, leaving a drifting path of her silky hair in the air behind her, and grabbed Nemesis by the hilt. “Ignominy suits this tool; it tastes of conceit.” She held up the sword and licked the muddy blade with a pale tongue. She paused to consider the taste, then dropped it in disgust back onto the peat. She turned her attention to the mud on her hand, which she appeared to find much more interesting that the dragonsteel sword. She licked some of the mud off her hand and smiled.

  Anthea summoned up her strength and spoke for the first time. “Thank you.”

  The girl turned to Anthea with a quick twitch of her posture and then sped out the entrance of the hollow as though shot from a sling. A banner of her impossibly fine hair rippled in her wake for a moment before following. As Anthea watched her go, it occurred to her that Aisling really did look like a leaf from behind. She drifted off again into sleep, warmed by her belly full of food.

  She awoke stronger, more alert, and again there was a cold, strange song in the air—the kind of song that this dark and icy land would sing, did it have a voice. Perhaps the kind of song that the ancient tree might sing, which seemed to shelter the sky itself in its branches. Anthea wondered: would she have found this song beautiful, once? Would she have been moved by it? Her condition struck her anew as overwhelmingly bleak, a loss so profound that she had also lost even the understanding of it. Overwhelmed by a sudden rush of despair, she sobbed.

  The song faltered, but did not cease. It moved to a place directly behind Anthea. Anthea felt her head lifted and laid down again on some soft pillow. Something tugged at her hair, combing it, weaving it, and this was overwhelming. Anthea had once loved her hair; she remembered that much. Acarnus had given her a sky-ivory hairbrush. She recalled hours spent making her hair presentable after they had first met, just for him, though she had not understood why. Endless hours on her windy mountaintop, combing her hair, watching the sunrise.

  Her fever had broken, but she did not notice, for it had been replaced by a flood of painful memories. She lay there and wept for her losses while Aisling sang a soft, sad song and braided, and braided, and sang.

  At last the grief wore itself out, and Aisling finished her work and fetched more soup for Anthea, this time with a side of fire-roasted mushrooms. She whispered in her almost-song as she brought the soup. “Ulluco in the soil, morchella in the dark, theba on the bark.”

  “I’m Aisling the Leaf,” she said as she began to feed Anthea. “And you: Anthea, unless, maybe, I am wrong?”

  Anthea nodded slowly. That was her name. “Not Cloudstone,” she said. “Just Anthea.”

  Aisling’s wide, bright eyes narrowed in vexation, and she frowned. “You are not Cloudstone, your blood not rock or water; you are Beloved.”

  Anthea did not respond. She rested her eyes on the roots twined overhead. Stars in the night sky showed through gaps in the lattice. The rich, hazy air blurred their drifting sparks of light.

  Anthea noticed something strange as Aisling finished feeding her. She could not feel some of her toes. She looked beneath the blanket, saw that she was unclothed, and saw also that she was missing two little toes on her right foot, and three on her left. Frostbite, no doubt. She wordlessly replaced the blanket and felt an uncomfortable pressure in her bladder. Aisling must have been cleaning her and the moss she slept on.

  Anthea sat up with a wince under the wide, watchful eyes of Aisling. The eyes of that strange girl made her always look surprised or fascinated. She watched as Anthea discovered the long braid Aisling had made in her hair, and she grinned a strange toothless grin as Anthea marveled at the complexity of it. The tresses were thin as yarn, and Aisling had woven dozens of them together into an angular diagonal pattern the likes of which Anthea had never seen.

  A new question came to Anthea’s mind. “How do you know my name?” she asked.

  “I know lots of names,” said Aisling as she crawled down from her perching rock. “I sniff them out like a wolf; I can taste the truth.” Like a lizard she clambered up to the roof and clung effortlessly to the roots. She pointed a small, pale hand at one of the miniscule windows through which Anthea saw the night sky. “I know the snow’s name; I can taste the dreams of stars; the tree opens up. The mountains love me, and all the little beetles, and you, I wonder?”

  Nemesis lay discarded in the turf across from Anthea. “You can taste names?” Anthea asked. Aisling nodded. “Is that why you licked the sword?”

  Aisling crinkled her tiny nose as though at a foul smell. “Nemesis of life! Did you know, I taste them all, the blood it’s taken?”

  Anthea summoned the strength to stand, leave the hollow in the roots, and relieve herself outside. Walking was awkward with only half her previous number of toes. Aisling’s hut lay far down at the base of the immense tree, hemmed in by a rough terrain of roots, boulders, and ice.

  Aisling wanted her to rest when she had returned, but the Leaf was also curious. She watched Anthea’s every move, and Anthea thought she saw the girl open her mouth every other moment to speak before changing her mind. Aisling crushed an assortment of flowers and mushrooms and other mysterious ingredients in a pestle, stewed them into a soup-strong tea, and bade Anthea drink. Anthea did, and soon returned to sleep.

  A drip of cold water awoke her. It fell steadily, once every few seconds, on her bare shoulder. She opened her eyes, alert and fully clear-headed for the first time since collapsing in the snow. No…for the first time since long before then.

  Something cool and smooth stirred against Anthea’s side beneath the blanket, and she drew the sheet of reeds back in alarm. It was Aisling, curled into a small catlike ball against Anthea’s side. Aisling had braided their hair together in an intricate latticework of ivory white and lustrous translucence, and she chewed softly on a stray lock of Anthea’s hair as she slept. Aisling stirred, murmured, hummed softly in her sleep, and faint suggestions of color rippled through her silken hair. Anthea’s scalp tingled strangely with some mysterious transfer of energy.

  Aisling the Leaf reminded Anthea, in that moment, of Fiora. And this was a good thing, a wonderful thing. Near the entrance of the hollow, Anthea’s scythe had been propped sideways between two roots for use as a drying rack. That was fine. It matched Nemesis, the dragonsteel blade being used to cut peat. That too was like Fiora.

  But Fiora was gone. They all were, and Anthea would not see them again. It reminded her of how they used to say, back on Infernus, ‘we are the last.’ Now she could say, ‘I am the last.’

  A small yawn made Anthea look down into the shimmering opal eyes of Aisling. Aisling spoke in her melodic whisper. “I am the last leaf. Can you be my friend, hero? We are both the last.”

  Anthea smiled down at her, and it occurred to her that it had been many days since she had smiled. And although Anthea was not sure whether it was possible, whether she could in fact be friends with anyone, let alone a leaf, she replied, “Yes.”

  Later, Anthea wondered aloud what had become of her missing toes. “I ate them,” said Aisling, and she might have elaborated for another fourteen syllables had a ringing sound not interrupted her.

  Aisling, alarmed by the sudden tones, began to ricochet around the hollow before being pulled up short by her hair, tied to Anthea’s. They both yelped at the sudden pain. Aisling ended up back in front of Anthea, crouched low in feral alarm. Anthea rose to her feet. Any intention of pursuing an investigation into the fate of her toes faded as she reached her cloak, withdrew her comm device, and saw that she had received a message. Anthea did not recognize the source, nor the program by which it had arrived on her device. It was only a single, purple word:

  IM: Hello?