Skylark (33 page)

I shifted my gaze away from the window. His bed stood in the corner, neatly made up, its single pillow dented in the middle from long use. An exquisitely carved chest of drawers stood low against the wall, below a broad, hand-painted canvas. I recognized it from my lessons at school as a map, full of pins and covered with hand-written notes. I longed to study it, for I was still thinking of Tansy’s off-hand comment that other cities besides mine still existed. But it was the chest of drawers, and the knick-knacks and trinkets that covered its surface, that drew my gaze.

Dorian saw me looking at the chest. “Gifts,” he said, of the trinkets. “Advice is as valuable currency here as any.”

There were carved figures, boxes beaten from the iron leaves overhead, rings and tiny puzzles. There was even a folded paper cat that could have been the twin of something Basil would have made. I felt tears sting my eyes and passed a hand across my face.

“Go on,” said Dorian, his voice soft. “You’re exhausted. Tansy will find you a bed for the night.”

•  •  •

Tansy brought me home to her family, which surprised me more than it probably should have. It seemed that family units were much more of a focus here than in my city. There, once you were harvested and got your working assignment, you rarely rejoined your family except on subsequent Harvest Days if you wanted to.

Tansy’s family barely skipped a beat, her parents setting up a pallet by the stove. They apologized for not having a spare mattress for me, but when I reminded them that I’d been sleeping on the ground for weeks, they subsided a little. I slept more soundly than I had done for a long time, next to the warmth of the stove, with the chatter of Tansy and her parents lulling me to sleep.

The dawn woke me, as people emerged from their houses as if on a schedule, beginning the day the moment the light penetrated the trees. I rose confused, listening to the sudden noises of life and movement, imagining myself for brief moments to be back in the city, listening to the clockwork dawn. As if nothing had changed.

When I had dressed myself and eaten a light breakfast, Tansy took me to work with her father. She explained that while she was technically a scout, she often came to help out her father when it was too dry for her magic to be sharp enough to serve her on watch. She called him a worker bee, but wandered off to chatter about something else before I could find out what that meant.

And so I tagged along with the pair of them with barely restrained eagerness, buzzing with purpose and excitement I hadn’t felt in a long time. I was a part of the world again, in a way I’d never been in the city. Here I could have a reason for being, slip into the role I was best suited for and live my life.

We walked past the outer ring of houses and down a path densely overgrown with iron trees. The narrow path had been cut through the thicket, and the sharp iron edges filed down, and yet the brambles still caught at my clothing. Tansy moved through it with ease, but I struggled through the grasping fingers of iron, the gloom under the trees pressing in at me.

We emerged from the tunnel of iron thicket into a valley so beautiful that I stopped breathing. At the heart of the Iron Wood, the trees were alive and thriving. Tall, thick, with the most heady of scents drifting on the air. The only sign that these trees had ever been like the iron ones surrounding them was that they, too, were caught in every season. Flowers and buds and bright, round fruits adorned the branches. Suddenly, I realized why the trees of the Iron Wood seemed to have been planted in rows.

“It’s an
orchard
,” I gasped, coming to a halt.

Tansy stopped, her father going on ahead. “As far as we know, it’s the last apple orchard in the world. We think it happened during the wars. When it petrified—or metallified, is that a word?—it preserved everything perfectly. And now, here, a few trees have begun to change back.”

“How? Magic can’t affect iron, can it?”

Tansy shrugged. “We don’t really know. My dad thinks that the wars were intense enough that even iron was affected. Maybe somewhere on the other side of the planet there’s an iron city that turned into a forest.”

There were people scattered about the orchard, some of them walking here or there on the ground, but most of them halfway up ladders, heads lost in the clouds of blossoms.

“What are they doing?” I asked, my voice still breathless with surprise and joy. Not even the revelation that even iron could be turned by magic if it was strong enough could distract me from the beauty of the orchard.

“Taking care of the trees. Come see,” was Tansy’s reply. She took my hand and led me around the edge of the orchard to find her father, who had taken up work halfway up a ladder.

“Dad,” she called up. “Can you show Lark what you’re doing?”

Her father glanced down at us and nodded, before climbing a few rungs down the ladder. A small pouch dangled from his wrist. He dipped a brush into it.

“No bees, of course,” called Tansy’s father. “So we’ve got to do the hard work ourselves.” He dabbed the brush against one of the bobbing sprays of blossoms, and moved along the row so quickly I struggled to follow the movement.

“Couldn’t you just . . .” I made a gesture with my fingers.

“Use magic?” Tansy grinned at me. “It’s so much harder to do things with magic than it is to do them by hand. So if we can do something naturally, we do.”

I gazed around at all the workers. “Did you turn them into real trees again? From the iron ones?”

Tansy shook her head, furrowing her brow at me. “
We
can’t magic iron,” she said. “No, they were like this when we found it, just smaller. Every now and then a new tree wakes up from the iron. Dorian believes that the magic is settling from the wars, and that things are beginning to return to normal.”

I thought of the pockets, the trees with teeth and the ghosts. And yet—perhaps there was truth to the idea. Some of the pockets were barely distinguishable from the outside world.

“But it must take days just to do a single tree,” I protested. “Why?”

Tansy gazed up at her father, the little brush flashing in and over the flowers. “Because someone has to. Because the birds do their best but they’re not designed for this. Besides, it’s worth it.”

She went to the next tree over—this one full of fruit being harvested—and stretched up onto her toes in order to pluck one down and toss it to me.

I glanced at the apple uncertainly, half-afraid I’d break a tooth on it if it still bore some resemblance to its iron neighbors. It smelled unimaginably delicious, though, and curiosity—and greed—got the better of my caution. I took a single, cautious bite.

The flavor was delicate and tangy, flooding my mouth as I crunched into it. It was perfectly ripe, and juice dribbled down my chin. There was no electric tang of magic, no metallic bitterness—there was only apple, more delicious than I had ever imagined. The architects had never come up with a way to synthesize apples, not without pollinators.

Suddenly, the rest of what Tansy had said sunk in.
The birds do their best
. What birds? I lifted my head, about to call out to Tansy and ask, when a flicker of motion caught my eye.

A shape darted down and across my vision. At first I thought it must be Nix, who had left that morning to explore the village, but the blur had been brown, not copper-gold, and there was no whir of clockwork whizzing by.

The shape settled onto a branch not two trees away from me. I stared at it, so familiar and strange all at once—it puffed up its little breast and gave a series of chirps that escalated to a piercing trill.

“Tansy,” I whispered fiercely, willing her to hear me, though I dared not raise my voice for fear of scaring the creature off. “Tansy!”

She came up beside me, following my line of sight to the branch, where the little bird was still singing its heart out. “Oh! Yeah. It’s a sparrow.”

“But—” I spluttered, still staring at the bird. “Birds are extinct!”

Tansy shook her head; I could see her smile out of the corner of my eye. “There aren’t many of them, but every now and then, a few more show up. We don’t know where they come from. But they find us somehow and come to live here in the apple grove. They help us pollinate the blossoms.”

The bird, mottled brown and white, crouched low as if bowing, eyes darting all around. And then it was gone again in a flash of wings, leaving only the branch bobbing up and down behind it. As I scanned the trees, knowing now what I was looking for, I saw other birds here and there, of varying types, flitting from branch to branch.

“Kind of like you,” Tansy was saying.

“What?” I blinked, turning to look at my new companion.

“They find their way here, we don’t know how. Kind of the same way you did.” She handed me a shovel. “Come on, let’s get some work done.”

•  •  •

The days passed in a rush of activity. I had thought my crosscountry trek of the past few weeks had been rough on my body, but it didn’t compare to the labor I put out in the Iron Wood. As far as I could tell there was no physical currency, despite the market I had seen. Work was their means of exchange. They bartered, and when someone had no goods, they’d offer hours of labor. Being a new arrival with little more than the clothes on my back, I spent much of my time performing menial tasks for various craftsmen in the village.

The market ran from dawn until midmorning, except for the rest day, when it lasted all day long. In exchange for continuing to live with Tansy’s parents, I did their shopping for them, sparing them the trip out at dawn. Tansy’s mother, an herbalist, also made a tangy cider from the apples in the orchard that was in high demand at the market.

The vendors would often include a little something extra—a handful of sweet carrots here, a potato pie there—for me, despite my protests that I had nothing to pay them. I was reminded of what Dorian had told me, that the majority of people in the Iron Wood still remembered what it had been like to be on the run and had found their ways here like me, bringing only what they could carry. They knew what it was like to have nothing.

There was no rite of passage, no trial to pass to be an adult here. There was nothing to set me apart from the others but that I was new. There were no formal schools, no graduations, no harvests. And despite being the first new person to turn up in over a year—a detail Tansy revealed days after my arrival— I still felt more at home than I had in the past several years in my own city. Maybe this was why I slept more soundly than I ever had, despite waking with a jolt each morning to the sound of the village stirring at dawn.

I was never happier than when working in the orchard, where the breeze tossed the living branches and dappled sunlight snuck through the leaves and blossoms. In the Iron Wood the muffling trees were rigid and dense, a tight-knit shield all around the village. Here, at least, I could breathe.

Nix settled into the daily life in the Wood as well. It vanished for hours, no doubt cavorting with the birds in the orchard. I often found Nix, transformed into the shape of some unidentifiable bird, flitting from apple blossom to apple blossom. It always drew a crowd. Dorian tried to press it into service as a messenger, and sometimes Nix would oblige, but it made its own decisions about when it felt like helping.

It was only in the evenings, before exhaustion caught up with me, that I let myself feel a tiny pang of discontent. Unlike the abrupt dawn, dusk was slow, a lazy winding down of the machinery that was the village, like clockwork running out. It made me long for action. My feet were restless, despite my weariness, and part of me longed for something new again. I couldn’t see the sky here except in the orchard, and the still closeness of the air made me itch to be on the move. For all the terror of the past few weeks, I found—to my utter confusion—that I missed the journey.

I longed to leave, to find Oren and tell him there was nothing to fear about the Iron Wood, that they’d welcome him if he chose to come. Maybe if he were here, I wouldn’t feel so restless. But even if I had any hope of finding him, I still wasn’t allowed outside the perimeter for fear I could signal another city. And so I tried to push Oren from my thoughts and let weariness carry me to sleep.

One morning, a hand shook me awake when it was still dark outside the window.

“Lark,” said Tansy’s father. “Wake up.”

I struggled out of sleep, muttering blearily about the sun and the dawn and the market. I apologized for sleeping in, too muddled to understand what was happening. The smell of Tansy’s mother’s herbs hanging to dry from the ceiling nearly overpowered me.

“It’s fine, the market hasn’t started yet, that’s not why I’m waking you up.”

I sat up, running a hand through my hair and squinting at him in the gloom. He carried a single candle, which he handed to me. There was someone standing beyond him at the door, a dark shape silhouetted against the slightly lighter purple darkness beyond.

“What’s going on?” Tansy’s voice came from behind me. She looked fully alert.
Scout training
, I guessed. I envied her competence. If she’d been the one lost in the wilderness, she never would’ve needed Oren’s help the way I did.

“There’s someone here for Lark,” said the person at the door. I recognized the voice as belonging to one of Tansy’s fellow scouts, one of the ones who’d caught me that first day, though I could not remember his name. “He’s at Dorian’s.”