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

hill, the path met another road, forming a huge crossroads filled with slabs of cracked black stone. “Well done,” I told Allie as we reached the crossroads’ center.
    She fell to her knees and threw up.
    I crouched by her side and handed her the wine skin. Allie swirled the liquid in her mouth, spit it up, and drank some more. Rain dripped from her hair and mine.
    “Sorry. It’s just … the things the River said.”
    “Like last time?” The River’s voice hadn’t made her throw up last time.
    Allie shook her head. “I don’t want to say. Not yet.”
    “Indeed.” Elin’s face was pale, and I wondered what the River had told her. “The light dims,” she said. “If we are to build shelter for the night, we must do it soon.”
    To the west, thunder rumbled. We had little means of shelter. “We’ll gather dead wood,” I said. “Search for dead grasses to lash it together.” I scanned the forest around us. The crossroads was wide enough that no tree shadows should be able to reach us if we stayed near its center.
    “A poor plan,” Elin said. “Allow me to suggest a better one.” She spread her cloak on the stones. It was still dry, as was her dress. “I am but a weaver, yet my power may be of some use here.” She moved her hands over the cloak. The fabric shimmered and flowed, turning as liquid beneath Elin’s touch as stone had beneath Nys’s. When the light faded, Elin’s cloak had grown thin as old paper with none of the brittleness, a square of cloth fifteen feet or more across.
    I reached out to touch it. It felt like well-woven wool, but the rain continued to roll off as if it were nylon from Before. I looked up at Elin, not hiding my admiration.
    A ghost of a smile played across her lips. “I trust you can find wood enough to fashion this into our shelter?”
    “I can,” I said, and headed into the forest to do so. Allie and I found some long straight branches, and Elin used them and more weaving to shape her cloak into a tent, with two rough walls to block the wind and a roof just high enough for us to sit beneath.
    We huddled under it, Allie and me in our sodden clothes, Elin in her dry ones. The rain was quite heavy by then, and Allie had begun to shiver. Elin took two stones from her belt pouches and tapped them together. The larger began to glow with warm orange light. Allie and I took turns holding it, warming our wet skin and doing what we could to dry our clothes. We’d chosen as flat a spot as we could find, but rain trickled in along cracks in the rock beneath us.
    “I cannot help with food,” Elin said. “The forest will have to provide that once the storm passes. I’ll not take food from my people for you. We struggle enough as it is. Toby—” She turned abruptly away to stare at the curtain of rain that fell from the edge of our shelter. It was full dark, and the flashes of lightning made the rain seem the edge of the world. I wondered who Tolven was to Elin, and how she would react if she knew he’d rescued us. I wondered if her people had truly gone as hungry as mine had since the War.
    Allie’s shivering eased. She yawned as she cupped Elin’s stone in her hands. “Think you can take first watch, Liza? I’m kind of tired. I’ve healed so much. I know I need rest.”
    Elin turned back to us. “I can watch, if you trust me to do so.”
    I didn’t trust her, but if she’d wanted to kill us, she could have left us to the weather and stayed safe and dry in her cloak. “All right,” I said. I didn’t know how long we’d have to wait for Matthew and Caleb, and I had to sleep sometime.
    Allie and I huddled together beneath Allie’s cloak, which was only damp now. I was more tired than I thought. In spite of the cold and the wet and the knowledge that the land around us could crumble without warning any time, I slept.
    When I woke, the wind had died and Elin sat watching the rain’s steady fall. Allie tossed restlessly in her sleep, as if at some bad dream.