Indigo Springs (18 page)

They buried Henna in the ravine behind the house, following a sketchy trail down to the banks of Indigo Creek. It was the first real day of summer, bright and hot, with a breeze that air-dried the sweat from Astrid’s body without leaving her any cooler. The perfume of scorching cedar bark hung in the air.

Sahara led the procession, holding the aluminum hand-rake. Jacks had the corpse, a bundle wrapped in an old T-shirt. Astrid, in the rear, bore the shovel.

They descended in silence until Jacks said, “If we go any farther, we’ll end up on Settlement Road.”

He was right—they’d reached the middle of the ravine, a small clearing encircled by trees and bisected by the muddy green-brown line of the creek.

Shaking herself out of a daze, Sahara pointed at a spot beneath a willow. Astrid began digging. It was good to have a task—it kept her from thinking about Ma contaminated with vitagua, about Henna’s withered body, tongue hanging loose, the festering gashes where Astrid’s teeth had broken its flesh…

Her gaze fell on Sahara’s hand for the twentieth time that day. The puncture where she had drawn the vitagua was healing cleanly. I did it right the second time, Astrid thought. She’ll be okay.

Sahara said the cat’s death meant it was unsafe to drain Ev. But, Astrid thought, fear of experimenting had always been Albert’s problem. If she was careful, Ma might be okay.

“Deep enough,” Jacks said. She’d dug a two-foot pit.

Sahara knelt beside the creek, clutching the handrake. She muttered the heat cantation, then drew the points of the rake through the grass. There was an explosion of movement—reeds growing and knotting, a churning of roots. A basket came together on the surface of the creek, filled with cattails and pine cones. The air grew chilly.

Sahara held the basket out and Jacks unwrapped the furry body, laying it on the greenery. Together they arranged the reeds. Solemnly, Sahara set the basket in the grave Astrid had dug.

“You want to say a couple words?” Astrid asked.

“Just cover it up.” Sahara put her face in her hands, and Astrid saw the healing puncture again.

“Let me.” Taking the shovel, Jacks set to work.

“Sahara,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s Albert’s fault. You didn’t know extraction was dangerous.”

“He said the first time you try anything magical you’ll probably screw up. I should have remembered.”

Sahara turned from the grave. “It was Mark’s cat.”

“If I’d hurt you…”

“It’s for the best.” Sahara’s expression became bleak, just for a second, before the mask fell back into place.

Jacks had been about to speak but at Sahara’s words he winced expressively and kicked at a sun-baked lump of moss, tearing it from the base of a tree root. “We’ve got to get a grip on this contamination thing.”

“Yeah,” Astrid sighed. Ma, exposed for a year now. Sahara, tainted by magical residue. Would she have to watch Sahara fall apart, as Ev had? By fall she could…

By autumn Sahara will be profoundly contaminated, her grumbles insisted.

“What are you gonna do about Ev?” Jacks asked. “If Sahara takes a day off again—”

“Who knew she couldn’t go one day without a check-in?”

“Can we save this until we get home?” Astrid said.

“Why? Jacks has killer timing. Nobody will overhear.”

“Astrid, if we’re going to keep your secret, we can’t have Ev going ballistic twice a week.”

“It’s not my fault, Eligible.”

“Guys! Peace!” Astrid waved her arms. Jacks glowered and kicked at the moss again. “Jacks, a few days ago you said we had everything under control.”

“A few days ago your mother wasn’t hurling the annotated
War and Peace
at my mother’s head. We weren’t having a kitty funeral.”

With a struggle, she unclenched her fists. “Let’s go home, have some lemonade, and figure out what to do.”

“I’m getting better at using Siren,” Sahara said. “I’ll get Ev under control—”

“Control.” Jack’s voice dripped sarcasm. “That’s your specialty, isn’t it?”

Astrid lifted her face skyward, letting the sunlight melt out vision, frying her cheeks and forehead. She had to stop this. Move them from arguing to cooperation…

Move, a grumble agreed, its tone dark and mirthful. The vitagua inside seemed to gurgle, and Astrid felt a deep internal wrench, a spear of cold deep in her diaphragm. Tightness made her clutch her gut….

“Astrid?” Hands on her shoulders suddenly—Jacks. The light on her face dimmed and the air temperature plummeted.

The grumble was laughing.

“What the hell’s going on?” Sahara said.

Gritting her teeth against a sharp new onset of pain, Astrid opened her eyes.

The ravine was gone. In its place were great glaciers of vitagua, mountain ranges of frozen blue, crags that extended to the horizon in every direction.

The three of them stood on a butte of cobalt ice, a sloping wedge that extended maybe thirty feet up from the ice flats around them. There was no breeze—just a deep cold that bit into Astrid’s flesh—and no sun. What light there was seemed to be coming from the spirit water itself, a blue glow that caught the frozen cracks and facets.

“People,” whispered Jacks, spreading his arms protectively in front of her. Impossibly tall trees were frozen within the icebergs towering above them, and nested in their branches was a building that looked like a long house, stretched out on a hammock of netted foliage.

“I don’t see anyone,” Sahara said.

“There.” Astrid pointed at a figure—a young woman caught in the act of climbing to the building. She had bear paws for hands. Her claws dug into the lumpy tree trunk.

Beyond the first house, Astrid could see other buildings, and other half-human, half-animal figures.

A hunk of ice twenty feet long cracked loose from the berg, falling to shatter on the frozen vitagua below.

“Yeah,” Jack said, voice breathy. “We’ve got everything under control. Where are we?”

“I’ll find out.” Bending, Astrid placed her hand on the ice. Information blasted through her, scattershot, and she yanked her fingers back. She was stuttering random words, in languages she didn’t speak.

“Astrid!” Sahara shook her. “Astrid, stay with us.”

She leaned on them, panting and staring at her hand. The warmth of her body hadn’t melted the ice—her skin was a chapped and frozen-looking red. “We’re in the unreal.”

“Where?” Jacks asked.

“Fairyland,” she said. “The spirit realm. A world within our world, where magical beings used to…live, I guess. To hide from the real world.”

“Wow,” Sahara said. Her eyes were gleaming.

The vitagua was trying to tell her a thousand things at once. There was much more to chanting than Albert ever guessed, said a grumble. Tricks and loopholes, ways to sequester magic within someone safely, endless possibilities. Spring-tappers had been making chantments for centuries, siphoning magic through the vitagua wells, but each generation got weaker, less knowledgeable. Nobody dared improvise, nobody listened to the voices of the unreal….

Power was all around her, intoxicating knowledge, and Astrid sensed it had been this way when she was young. But she’d let it go to her head, the way Sahara did with Siren.

She looked at her friends. Can we keep each other honest?

Without discussing it, they edged down the slope, clinging to each other for warmth. The ice, fortunately, wasn’t slick: it had the sticky consistency of tar. They shuffled in a huddle, letting Jacks lead the way.

“The witch-burners wanted to control magic,” Astrid told them, isolating a grumble. “They drove it out of people all across Europe—killed fairies and witches. But not everyone sat around waiting to get fried. Some came here.”

“Sounds okay,” Jacks said. “Wizards and magic and mythical creatures were hidden here while in the real world the bad guys thought they were winning.”

“Yeah,” Astrid said. “The real became more safe, predictable. The witch-burners succeeded in creating a near-monopoly on magic. Unfortunately, they weren’t content. They wanted it all.”

“What happened?” Jacks demanded.

“A battle, I think.” She rubbed her temple. If she touched the ice floe again…

“No, you don’t,” Jacks said, catching her hand.

They reached the edge of a glassine stretch of ice, where the air was misty and marginally warmer. Stalagmites of vitagua jutted upward from the mirror surface of the ice, forming a forest of widely spaced columns. Some were only pencil-thick, thin poles of blue that came to pinpoints at waist height. Others towered hundreds of feet tall, their bases as wide as the trunks of ancient redwoods.

“We need ice skates,” Sahara laughed.

“Why are we going this way?” Jacks asked.

Astrid pointed. The spaces between the stalagmites were alight…and the light wasn’t blue. It was gold. “We need to learn all we can.”

They skated into the glow, Astrid leading until she rounded a wide stalagmite and almost slipped. Jacks caught her before she could fall.

She had nearly bumped into an ice statue of Albert.

He was ten feet tall, dressed as usual in jeans and a T-shirt. Hair shagged around his face in a mane. One empty hand curved outward in a gesture of offering. Instead of his habitually weary expression, he was smiling.

“Daddy,” Astrid said. Albert looking happy…so bright and heroic.

A half-dozen birds were frozen in the ice at his feet, gawking accusingly at her with dead eyes. Her face warmed with a rush of fresh tears. She looked away from the disturbing reproach she sensed within the small corpses.

Dad. She had been his apprentice, and she had forgotten….

She touched his leg, and the thoughts of the frozen people of the unreal grumbled through her. The ever-present pain in her head hummed back, trying to drown it out.

Back in the real, nobody remembered Dad. If they thought of him at all, it was as a bum, a petty crook, a burden on his family. Here, where nobody could see it, he had a monument.

“Magic exists in the shade, Bundle,” she mumbled, only stepping back when her tears ate into the chiseled ice of his leg.

“Come on, honey,” Sahara said at last. “Come on, there’s more to explore and we’re getting cold. You got here once, you’ll figure out how to return.”

Jacks agreed. “You can bring flowers next time, okay?”

Astrid rubbed her nose, smiling weakly. They moved on, and behind a stalagmite of blue ice they found another statue, a woman Astrid recognized from old photos—Albert’s grandmother. Farther still was a man who might have been Granny’s father. After that it was strangers….

“Who are they?” Sahara asked.

“The other spring-tappers,” Astrid said, quoting yet another grumble. “Everyone ever initiated into the mysteries of the Spring.”

They slid on in silence, briefly looking over each statue until Jacks stopped short before a statue of a woman with long braids, clad in an old-fashioned dress.

“Elizabeth Walks-in-Shadow,” he said.

The sculpture of Elizabeth was different from the  others…darker. Flecks of red were dispersed through its icy body like poppy seeds in a cake, and instead of radiating goodwill, her face was tired and severe.

Jacks’s mouth hung open. “I was sure she’d been murdered to shut her up about the potlatch fire.”

Astrid brushed her fingers across the surface of Elizabeth’s statue. Another rush of information jolted through her. “She was attacked. Instead of dying…Jacks, she’s
in
there.”

“Alive?”

“Half alive, like the birds,” she whispered. Her heart was hammering. She clutched his hand. Something wrong, something bad…the grumbler was laughing again.

“Alive,” Sahara scoffed. “She’d be two hundred.”

“She’s sleeping,” Astrid insisted. “Vitagua isn’t water. If you’re submerged, you don’t drown. Your spirit mixes into the spirit water. If you’re frozen…”

“What?”

“Frozen,” she stammered. “Get the body into ice before it cools. Only way to save—”

“Astrid!”

She fought to anchor herself in the present, gulping air, fighting back horror. Words battered her eardrums, shrieking: basement, window, snipers, blood. She pressed her fists to her ears.

Jacks asked, “Do the grumbles say who killed Elizabeth?”

Elizabeth.
She mouthed the name and the din quieted. “Her…apprentice found her as she was dying and…”

“Put the body into ice to save her, you said,” Jacks said. “Save her—can she get out of there?”

“Get out,” Astrid whispered, pushing the words past a throat-clenching mixture of terror and hope.

“Let her be, Jacks.” Sahara’s voice cut through the hubbub. “Can’t you see you’re upsetting her?”

“She’d just…be able to say what happened,” Jacks said. He stared up at Elizabeth’s face, amazed. “She could tell me.”

“You and your obsessions,” said Sahara. “Astrid, we’re almost there. Can you keep going?”

“Yes.” Taking their hands, Astrid slid closer to the blazing golden light. They were near enough now that it was almost blinding, a hot wash that outshone the blue light emanating from the largest stalagmites.

Frozen inside another column was the source of the glow—a man blazing gold from head to toe. He was clad in peculiar armor, translucent plates that covered his body. His hair was red, and a fiery, transparent sword blazed in his grip. His left hand, its fingers twisted, clawed for the open air. He was encased in frozen vitagua, all but the tip of one fingernail. That had melted free and was stuttering with sparks that melted whatever they touched, leaving a thin ribbon of vitagua twisting against the bottom of a deep pothole.

Gazing down, Astrid spotted something dull and red.

“What is it?” Sahara crowded close.

“It’s our house,” Astrid said. “The bottom of our fireplace. See the red? It’s the bricks Albert used to seal off the bottom of the hearth.”

“Why? I thought he wanted chantments disseminated to the masses.”

“To slow it down?” She peered into the crude hole, an icy bowl with a groove where the melted vitagua ran. The thread of spirit water wiggled like a tongue working at a loose tooth.

“This is where our drip comes from?” Sahara said. Her hand stole toward the melted spirit water, but Jacks pulled her back. “You said we’d never find it, Jacks.”