The Faerie War (5 page)

“Violet?” I look up and see Jamon and the girl with green ribbons in her hair—Natesa?—strolling toward me. “Are you okay?” he asks.

I sit up straight. “Um, yeah. Why?”

The girl smiles. “You’re staring at the ground as though it’s done something terribly offensive.”

Right. I make a conscious effort to smooth out my features as I say, “Uh, no, that’s just my thinking face.”

She laughs. “Well, anyway, I’m Natesa. We haven’t actually met yet.”

“Oh, yeah, hi.” I should probably say something else, but I have no idea what. I think Natesa is the girl who dropped off some clothes for me at Farah’s house during my first week here, but I’m not certain. It would be weird if I thanked her and it turned out to be someone else. I wind a strand of hair around my finger and try to think up some appropriate words. Have I always been this awkward around people I don’t know, or are social skills are just something I forgot along with the rest of the details of my life?

“Okay, well, I need to get home.” She rolls her eyes. “My mother’s expecting me. She’s been seriously overprotective ever since The Destruction.”

“Oh, okay.” I give her a little wave as she hurries away. When she’s out of sight, I say, “I didn’t scare her off, did I?”

“No, no, she was telling the truth about needing to get home.” Jamon sits down on the swing beside me. “Natesa is one of the few people who
isn’t
scared of you, actually. She’s been telling me for weeks to get over myself and stop treating you like someone who’s about to attack us all.”

I scoot backward with my feet, then let myself swing forward. “I like Natesa.”

“Yeah, everyone does. She’s pretty awesome.”

I swing back and forth, watching the dreamy look on his face each time I pass him. I want to tease him about her—I mean, it’s
so
obvious he likes her—but I’m not sure we’re at the point yet where I can do that. He might lose his temper and threaten to lock me up.

I bring the swing to a stop, then turn in the seat to face him. I want to know where we stand with each other, and there’s only one way to find out. “Do you still hate me?” I ask.

He’s silent for a moment, then shakes his head.

“So it’s really that easy for you to change your mind about me? All I had to do was shoot our common enemy?”

He shrugs. “I suppose so. In my head, I’ve separated you from the rest of your kind. To me, you’re not really one of them.”

“So you still hate guardians in general?”

“Yes.”

I wrap my hand around the swing’s linked chain. “Why? I don’t get it. Farah told me that guardians fight evil in order to protect people. Isn’t that a
good
thing?”

He shakes his head slowly, but I can’t tell if he means no or if he just means that I don’t understand. “They protect humans. They protect themselves. Occasionally they protect other fae. Mostly, though, they seem to wind up killing or capturing fae creatures for crimes that I would hardly call evil. They dish out so-called
justice
to everyone else, but who judges them? Who do they have to answer to?” He raises his eyes to look at me. “I wonder how many you’ve killed.”

His words startle me.
Killed?
There’s a possibility I’ve
killed
someone? My hand slips down the chain, and I watch it, trying not to imagine it covered in blood. I have faint memories of fighting various creatures. Memories that dance at the edges of my mind, flitting away when I try to grasp at them. I suppose it’s only logical that I ended up killing some of those creatures. “I don’t know,” I admit. “But I’m sure I wouldn’t kill anyone unless they deserved it and they gave me no other choice.”

“You’re sure, huh?”

“Yes,” I say with more certainty than I feel.

“Well, anyway, I have to get going.” He stands up. “We’re making preparations to move our entire community. It’s going to be a major mission.”

“Oh, I wanted to ask you about that,” I say. “Your dad was saying you don’t know
how
to get everyone to the new hiding place. Why can’t you all just do your vanishing thing and end up there?”

“The children haven’t learned how to do that yet. And what about all our belongings?” He looks at me like I’m stupid. “We may know some magic, Violet, but we can’t do the things faeries do. We can’t recreate everything from scratch with a snap of our fingers when we get there.”

Right, like it’s really that easy for faeries. “Am I missing something here?” I ask. “Why can’t you take your stuff with you when you vanish?”

Now he’s looking at me as though I have the intelligence level of a troll. “We can’t
take things with us
when we vanish. We take ourselves and that’s it. That’s the way it works.”

“Oh. So . . . you’ve obviously tested that out?”

He rolls his eyes. “Obviously. Reptiscillas have known about this limitation for centuries, Violet. Anything bigger than, I don’t know, a loaf of bread gets left behind when you vanish with it.”

I stand up quickly, leaving the swing’s chains rattling against each other. “You know what? I think I can help you.”

Two days later, more than two thousand reptiscillas living Underground have packed up their belongings. They can’t vanish with them, obviously, but that’s where I come in. Being a faerie, I don’t have the reptiscillas’ limitations. I can take anything I want through the faerie paths with me, as long as I keep hold of it. So I told Asim that if everyone loaded their stuff onto carts, I could open a really wide doorway to the faerie paths and pull the carts through with me.

I was excited about my idea, as were Asim and the other leaders, until I calculated that it would take me about
ten hours
of continuous work to get the hundreds of cartloads through the faerie paths. But I’m a guardian, so I can handle it, right? And doing this will prove to the remaining reptiscillan doubters that I can be trusted.

The only thing I can’t help them with is moving their children. Reptiscillan children haven’t learned how to vanish yet, and they can’t travel through the faerie paths because it would kill them. So every child under the age of ten left on foot early yesterday morning for the new hideout, accompanied by their parents, several leaders, and a whole lot of warriors.

Things have been tense down here ever since.

“Okay, every family who owns a cart has finished loading up,” Jamon says as he walks toward me. “You’ll need to bring empty carts back for everyone else.”

I nod. I’m standing in the middle of the Circle, and every tunnel I look down has carts lined up as far as I can see. Each cart is big enough to carry at least twenty people. Reptiscillas use magic to move their carts around, and I’m obviously going to have to do the same thing.

Asim shouts to me from the other side of the Circle. “All right, you’re up, Violet. We’re bringing the first cart.”

I turn to Jamon. His eyes examine me, giving me a look that I think says,
we can trust you, right?
I nod. He reaches inside his jacket and pulls out a stylus. I was allowed to use it briefly this morning, but then he took it back. After a moment’s hesitation, he hands it to me. I know this time he’ll let me keep it. It’s the same stylus that was hiding in my boot when Farah found me passed out in the forest. The same stylus Jamon confiscated from me about half an hour after I woke up.

With a deep breath, I turn around and walk toward the largest piece of blank wall on the outer edge of the Circle. I chose this spot yesterday while everyone else was rushing around getting things packed. I raise my hand to the sandy wall and scratch the words to open a doorway into the dirt. Words that seem to come automatically to me, like breathing. Beneath my hand, the dirt melts away to reveal a black opening. I feel for the edge of the doorway and make a spreading motion with my hands, pushing the opening to extend it. I try not to think of all the people standing behind me watching me wave my hands around like a mad woman.

When the opening is wide enough, I turn around and see Asim standing nearby with the first cart. I slide one foot backward through the doorway to prevent it from closing, then motion to Asim to bring the cart closer.

“Ready?” he asks.

“Of course.”

With his magic, he sends the cart rolling toward me. It slows and stops before bumping into me. I wrap my hand around a wooden piece sticking out at the front. With my free hand, I release some magic, send it flowing beneath the cart to the back, and push. Then I walk, the cart moving beside me, into the darkness. The light behind me diminishes. When it disappears completely, I know the doorway has closed.

I focus then on the new hiding place. It’s inside a mountain. I don’t know exactly where, but Asim gave me enough details for me to arrive at the correct place this morning.  He met me there and showed me the room he wanted everything delivered to. As I picture the room in my head now, light forms in front of me. I push the cart forward through the rapidly expanding hole, and a group of young reptiscillan men waiting in the room jump up and whoop with excitement. I push the cart into the center of the room, then turn around and head back Underground.

It isn’t hard work; it just gets boring after a while.

Open doorway, walk through, wait for doorway to open on the other side, push cart through, walk back.

Repeat.

People begin unloading the carts as soon as I push them through. After several deliveries, I’m able to start taking empty carts back with me. I lose track of time, but I must have been going for several hours when Asim makes me sit down to eat something. I assure him I’m feeling fine, but he insists.

I sit on a swing in the playground munching a sandwich he brought me, trying to ignore Jamon pacing around and around a set of climbing bars. Eventually I say, “Hey, Natesa’s going to be fine. Stop worrying.”

“What?” He stops and looks up at me. “What are you talking about?”

“I know that’s what you’re worrying about.” Natesa’s younger brother is nine years old, so he had to go on foot to the new location, along with his parents. Natesa refused to let her family go without her.

“Don’t be silly,” Jamon says. “I’m worrying about everyone out there.”

I give him a knowing look before turning back to my sandwich. “Whatever you say.”

I continue working late into the evening. After my third snack break, I’m sure there can’t be that many cartloads left. With the end in sight, I try to speed up, opening doorways as quickly as I can. But just when I think I’m finally finished, Asim says, “Okay, once we get the transporters through we’ll be done.”

Transporters?
“What? I can’t drive those things.”

He must notice the panic on my face because he laughs as he places a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to drive them. We’re busy loading the transporters onto the carts. These last few trips won’t be any different from the other loads you’ve taken through.”

I look over his shoulder and see a cart with an egg-shaped transporter balanced on top of it. Two men direct the cart carefully toward me. Just as I wrap my hand around the piece of wood at the front of the cart, I hear shouting coming from one of the tunnels. Most people have vanished by now, but I know there are still a few guards hanging around. And the guys who own the transporters, I guess. I peer around the side of the cart to see what’s going on.

“They’ve found us!” yells the reptiscillan guard who comes running out of the tunnel. “Draven’s faeries! They’ve—” He jerks to a halt, then falls forward onto the ground. Protruding from his back is a sparkling arrow exactly like the one I shot a few days ago. A moment later, faeries spill out of the tunnel into the Circle. They’re wearing the same dark blue uniform I saw on the man and woman who came searching for us in the forest. Glittering arrows fly everywhere, missing their targets as reptiscillas start vanishing. Colored sparks dart and weave, and spears of ice shoot across the Circle. A knife sails toward me and lands with a
thwack
in the wooden cart just inches from my head. I duck down behind the cart.