Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
Awareness returned in soft drops like rain. The first flutter of my eyelids, the first brush of my fingers against warm stone. I knew that much.
Little else.
Then it spread rapidly, ripples on a lake, disturbing the still surface.
I was dead.
I knew I’d died.
There’d been space between the last conscious thoughts of my mind, the last frantic firings of a brain deprived of everything it needs to exist. Then nothing.
Over, done, in a blink.
Feeling returned to my hands and I pushed up from where I found myself sprawled, sacrificial, on a stone table. The world had changed around me.
Or the world I’d left was not the same one I’d woken to. The colors were muted here, a brush of dull pastels over a landscape I didn’t recognize. And the sun—
There wasn’t one. Only a full expanse of navy blue without clouds or stars. This wasn’t the Meadow of the Arised.
And I wasn’t alone.
An old woman rested against a log nearby, a cane nestled between her legs. Her gnarled hands looped over the top, chin resting on top of her hands.
“Good. You’re awake.” She pushed to her feet, finding her balance with the help of the long expanse of mahogany polished to a gleam. “Welcome to the Summerlands.”
Yup. Dead.
Devastation buried the thought. I really was gone and I’d never see my friends again. I’d never kiss Mike again. I’d never get the chance to listen to Melia’s laughter or Bronwen’s dirty jokes. Even Coral’s griping.
Only an idiot would miss her cousin’s complaints. The Summerlands were in trouble.
Misery activated me into motion. This was what I’d needed to do anyway, exactly what I’d told my mother.
I’d had to die in order to set right what happened to the Aether. It may not have happened the way I expected, but I was here. I might as well right my wrong even if I never went back.
“The Summerlands,” I repeated to the old woman. My legs dangled over the side of the table. “Do you know where the Aether are?”
She chuckled. “Of course I do. Now let’s get you off this dolmen and I’ll show you the way. It’s why I’m here, after all. To guide you.”
“Dolmen?”
“Surely you’ve seen them before, in Ireland? They’re a go-between from your world to this one. When Fae die, they manifest on a dolmen and there’s always a guardian waiting to help them with the transition. You’ll want some clothes, too.”
Another heartbeat and the realization landed. I sat on the stone naked, and as hard as I tried to feel embarrassed by it, there was nothing.
The old woman reached into a sack slung across her back to gather the clothing. “We come into death naked, as we come into life naked. Here.” She used her cane under her left hand to steady her and reached for me with the other. “Come now.”
I landed beside her, the impact absorbed by the ground, and she thrust the clothes at me.
“I need to reach the Aether,” I insisted. “Where are they?”
The old woman laughed again. “Why would you need to reach the spirit gods so soon after arriving?”
I slid the dress over my head. “I’m here to help them.”
“No one can reach them, lovie.”
I waited for familiar anger and frustration to rise but there was nothing here. Only a shadow of emotions that used to control me, as though my soul had some catching up to do to adjust to a new reality.
“Why can no one reach them?” I asked.
My guide blinked surprisingly clear brown eyes up at me. “They’re trapped. Inside their walled city.”
So that was my mission. At least it was fairly straightforward. “Take me to them.”
“What, just like that?”
I fixed her with a determined stare.
She shrugged. “It’s your funeral. Ha! A little humor never hurts.”
We cut across the meadow away from the dolmen. The Summerlands stretched out before us, insubstantial yet more solid than anything I’d ever seen.
I fell into step beside her, the borrowed dress loose down to my ankles. “How long have they been trapped?”
“You’ll learn soon enough. Time means something only to the newly crossed. The ones who still feel the tether to the other side of the veil. I only know the Aether have not been able to travel beyond their citadel in—”
The conversation fell short under the thunder of racing footsteps. Their noise grew, running up the hill toward us.
“Tavi!”
My name, said with a voice I’d never forget but also never thought I’d hear again. My nervous system—if I had one as a spirit—immediately calmed when I turned.
And Livvy pulled me into her arms.
She was solid, warm, a comfort. Her familiar scent soothed parts of me I hadn’t known were raw and bleeding as we clung to each other.
“Mom.”
Spirits cry. Spirits feel everything, I realized that when it all crashed down on my head. Tenderness, crushing grief, hope. If I still breathed, if my lungs worked, Livvy would have squeezed the life out of them.
“I felt you arrive and I came running,” she murmured into my hair. “You’re here.”
She didn’t sound happy to see me. “We talked about me doing this.” I couldn’t find the strength to say I had to die. Not yet. “So here I am.”
I refused to let go of her. Not when she looked so much like herself. But…no, slight changes smoothed out the lines of worry I’d gotten used to seeing between her eyebrows. Her skin was smooth, perfect, Fae.
Spirit Livvy had grown a few inches, her hair was fuller, a richer shade of chestnut in autumn. Her eyes were a paler hue, but otherwise I’d have mistaken her for a sister instead of a mother.
This was the woman she’d been before she went into hiding. Before my father died.
This wasn’t Livvy or the persona she’d crafted to survive. This was Dae.
“How did it happen?” she asked, searching my face.
“Glass shard through the heart.” Tears pricked my eyes. “Kendrick found me.”
Livvy hugged me closer, absorbing my pain into her, all while my guide watched us and said nothing.
“I’m sorry,” Livvy breathed out. “I’m sorry it had to happen to you this way. I didn’t want you here, Tavi, and I mean it from the depths of my soul. I’m thrilled to see you, but I didn’t want it to be like this.”
The horrible image of her falling by Dorian’s hands was thousands of miles away the longer I held her. Because her body might have died but what made my mother her still existed.
“Come. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
I pulled free. “Is Noren here?”
“Trust me. You’ll see him again.”
She linked her arm through mine. My guide, content to amble alongside us humming, used her cane as more of a crutch left over from life than as any sort of useful tool now.
Speech was impossibly far away. My tongue had thickened and cemented itself to the roof of my mouth.
I leaned hard into Livvy to remember the closeness but my mind kept superimposing the image of her death over her spirit form.
Her wide-open glassy eyes then could not replace the smile she now shot at me for long.
“It’s a short walk, I promise,” she urged.
The Summerlands spread out, vast, and reminded me, inexplicably, of a place I’d never been. But once again my mind superimposed something from the real world over this one. The craggy highlands of Scotland replaced the field where I’d awoken.
“If I’d known her mother would be there to fetch her, then I wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble,” my guide grumbled.
Livvy walked with a lightness in her step I hadn’t seen. “You’re the official guide. I’m just a mom who had to see her kid.”
Her short time in this place had shed the layers of burden from her shoulders along with several years’ worth of aging. The image she presented now was of bright-eyed youth and optimism, not only from the spring in her step but the smile permanently lifting her lips.
I took her in as much as the surroundings.
Soon enough, the landscape evened out into a large plateau with small stone outcroppings, dusted by muted purple heather.
Beyond, a walled city loomed over the valley, nestled on a hillside above the plain. White spires tipped the navy blue sky.
I was surprised to see that there was a camp here on the plateau, an endless sea of tents amongst an otherwise beautiful landscape. Rather than simply a place to survive, this area of the Summerlands became a refuge, where weary souls could rest and replenish.
My attention snagged again on the walls of the city, bright as a sun-bleached shell on the beach. A high wall blocked most of the view, but spires and turrets speared into the monotone sky like hands stretched in prayer for passing.
“This way.”
Livvy guided me through the maze of tents and somewhere along the way we lost sight of the woman with the cane. Several people lifted their hands in greeting as I passed, soldiers I’d lost. Friends I’d grieved.
Professor Marsh jogged over for a quick hug and I hugged her back in shock. “It’s good to see you again, Tavi. I’m so sorry I fell early. I’ll never forgive myself for going out that way but hell, it was fun while it lasted.”
I gestured around me. “What’s going on here?”
She shrugged. “Beats me. We’re all camped out on this empty plain but no one knows why.”
Livvy smiled and tugged me off before I had a chance to ask Marsh about the walled city. “I know,” Livvy soothed. “There are so many people here you want to see. But I promise you, this…this is important.”
She deftly maneuvered us around tents and stopped in front of one pitched beside a large clump of heather. The flap opened.
“Hey there. I’ve been waiting for you.” A man whose face I didn’t know stood there, his shoulders broad, and if I blinked quickly, I would have sworn it was Uncle Will.
Something about his presence clanged through me, like a familiar tune I’d forgotten.
He beamed, his long auburn hair nearly hiding one side of his face. A roguish smile tugged his lips toward eyes the same color as the man who’d raised me, and although my mind knew, my heart knew, it took a bit longer for my consciousness to catch up.
“Tavi, this is your father,” Livvy whispered.
Dad?