Bones of Faerie03 - Faerie After by Janni Lee Simner Page A

trees to the west, bluffs rose toward the sky. To the east, the broad River—which maps called the Mississippi—lapped at the platform and stretched to the far horizon.
    “Are humans always so slow?” Elin asked us.
    Neither Allie nor I bothered answering that. Allie looked from the Arch to me. “Do we wait here?”
    I shook my head. I didn’t want to risk letting Caleb and Matthew get this close. “They’ll come to the crossroads.” I’d seen that in my vision, though I didn’trecognize all the paths they took to get there. “We’ll wait there. Just to be safe.” I looked to the River. Its muddy water held a dank, mildewy scent I didn’t like at all.
    Allie followed my gaze to the water. “Oh. Right.” Her voice was small. The River would be a problem.
    “You feel it, too,” Elin said. It wasn’t a question. “It is worse than when I last came to your world. I can almost see the unraveling threads that flow between its banks, this world’s own threads, crumbling to dust.”
    Her words sent ice down my spine. I’d felt death enough flowing south, when I last was here. “What has the crumbling to do with the River?”
    “It is your river. You would know better than me. To me it feels like a seam whose threads are giving way to the gray to which we all must soon return. My own world has been giving way to that same gray since the Uprising. If something is not done, it will fall before yours. Do you wonder, then, that I sought my mother’s help to mend this?”
    Raindrops trickled down my neck and beneath my sweater. Allie looked uphill along the short path to the crossroads, which we both knew from our last journey together. She reached for my good hand. “You won’t let go?”
    “I—” I couldn’t say I hadn’t let go so far. I’d let Nys take her, more than once. “Not if I can help it.”
    Allie laced her fingers through mine. Rain spattered her nightgown and cloak. “I won’t let you go, either,” she said.
    Together we crossed the stone platform. Elin followed at Allie’s other side.
    “Stay away from the water,” I told her. “No matter what it says to you.”
    “Do you think me a fool, who would go willingly to my death?” Elin asked. Rain beaded off her cloak, leaving it dry.
    “Liza.”
The River whispered my name as my bare feet touched the muddy forest floor.
“You return at last, as all things must. Come here. Seek sleep. Come.”
    That call pulled on some thread deep inside me, urging me toward the water. I pressed my toes into the mud, resisting as I had once before. The seeds in my pocket helped, their green tugging on that same thread, reminding me I wasn’t ready to sleep, not yet. Allie’s steps didn’t seek the River, either, not like last time. Perhaps her seed protected her after all, from this at least.
    The wind blew on. The rain fell harder as we walked through the mud, soaking my sweater and leather pants. We had no rain gear, no means of making a fire. If the rain continued for long, we’d be in a fair amount of trouble.
    The trees scarcely seemed to notice either us or the rain. They bent toward the River, as if anything else wereof little concern. A clump of damp gray dust fell like late-winter snow from a branch. There was an empty patch in the forest beyond it, nothing but wet gray soil. We walked swiftly around it.
    “Too long have you fought death’s current,”
the River whispered to me.
“You cannot save yourself. You cannot save those you care for. Seek rest, Liza. Seek darkness. Seek peace.”
    “I can save them.” I ignored the icy raindrops that hit my face, focusing on fighting the River’s call, on holding Allie’s hand, on walking around another patch of gray. “I will save them.”
    The clouds darkened. We came to a broken path among the trees—asphalt, those born Before called the black stone—and the River’s voice faded as we followed it uphill, making our way between yellow-leafed ginkgoes and poplars.
    At the top of the