The Whispering Trees (18 page)

Years passed.

They were good years, stitched together not only from births and weddings and celebrations, but ordinary details like trimming nails and darning socks and waiting for various eggs to boil. Kara grew from a pretty child to a beautiful young woman, the spitting image of her mother. With her school days now behind her she began to take on more responsibilities at home, but though Kara loved spending time with her family, she did not believe she was destined to be a farmer. She had begun to earn a fair amount of seeds by tending to sick livestock, and she suspected there might be a place in De'Noran for a woman who specialized in doctoring animals. Kara was unusually good with them.

Occasionally, on what she came to think of as her
“strange days,” Kara felt that she was not Kara Westfall at all but a thief who had stolen someone else's life. These days were few and far between, however, and in the end she did not pay them much mind.

Life was everything she had always wanted it to be.

On a morning just three weeks shy of her sixteenth birthday, Kara headed to the Fringe to gather herbs. Farmer Loder had a cow with the tremors, and he was willing to pay Kara two browns for a cure, a respectable day's work. Kara wished that Mother could have joined her, but since Master Blackwood's death the previous season, Mother had taken his place at the schoolhouse. She swore it was temporary, but Kara had her doubts; she heard the enthusiasm in her mother's voice when she spoke of her charges. Kara had asked Taff to come to the Fringe instead, but he was locked away in his work shed building some sort of machine he swore would cut their threshing time in half. She didn't doubt it.

Kara ate from a handful of berries and thought about the upcoming Shadow Festival. Two boys had already asked her to the dance. The first was a Clearer named Lucas, and though he seemed pleasant enough, Kara knew him on only a passing basis. She had refused him immediately.

The second boy presented a more complicated scenario. Aaron Baker came from a good family, demonstrated a fine singing voice at Worship, and was certainly not unpleasant in appearance. Despite this, Kara did not like him, sensing that beneath his smooth words lurked a dangerous combination of cruelty and cowardice. It wasn't the first time Kara had been granted a feeling of unwonted familiarity about another member of the village, as though she had a deeper pool of experience to draw from than just her day-to-day life. She had never told anyone about these inexplicable insights, not even her own family . . .

. . .
because you don't trust them they're not your real—

Kara squeezed the thoughts away.
Nonsense. Just nonsense
. She hadn't been sleeping well lately, and as a result her thoughts were singular and scattered. That's all it was.

She walked along the border of the Fringe, searching for the herbs she needed.
A pinch of thistlerun, laberknacle, gill's ferry
. It would be easier if she could just enter the Fringe itself, of course, but that was forbidden. Instead, Kara snagged those plants beyond her reach with a long, hooked rod and dragged them back to her basket.

The wind rose to a feverish pitch and the trees of the Thickety creaked and groaned like stretching giants. Kara kept her eyes averted from them, as she'd been taught.

She heard footsteps.

“Hello?” Kara asked. She scanned the Fringe weeds, taller than they should have been; the Clearers, of late, had been lax in their work. “Is someone there?”

Parting two overgrown ferns, Grace Stone poked her head out.

“I found something interesting!” she exclaimed. “Come see!”

Grace's dress was torn in several spots and covered in dried mud, and her filthy white hair, littered with leaves, hung down her back in tangled waves. Kara could not remember the last time she had seen her wear shoes.

“I have to get back.”

“This will take but a moment. I
need
to show you.”

“Why?”

Grace shifted uncomfortably. “I don't know
why
. I only know
what
.”

“You're talking nonsense,” Kara said. “I have chores.”

“Ah, yes,” said Grace. “Chores. Sweep the porch. Till the field. Marry the boy.” She tilted her head to one side and examined the ground in front of Kara's feet with keen interest. “What does
that
mean?”

Kara looked down. Using the sharpened end of her stick, she had scrawled something in the earth:

REMEMBER WHAT IT EATS
.

As usual, she did not remember writing the sentence, but she recalled, with shocking clarity, its other appearances in her life. Whispered in her ear upon waking. Clapped out by ocean waves. Pattered by raindrops on the roof.

It's important. I don't know why, but these words might be the most important thing in my life
.

“Remember what it eats,” Grace said, considering. “The thing I found in the Fringe—I think it might have something to do with that. If you're interested, that is. I wouldn't want to distract you from your
chores
.”

“Show me,” said Kara.

Grace had to use her walking stick to maneuver across the unsteady ground of the Fringe, but despite her weak leg she kept a steady pace. Kara followed her along the outskirts of the border, refusing to enter the Fringe itself.

What am I doing?
she thought.
I'm following the craziest girl in the village. Why?
The instincts that had served Kara
so well the past few years were complicated when it came to Grace. For some unfathomable reason she trusted what the girl was saying, but she did not trust the girl herself. Not one bit.

“Here,” Grace said.

Using her walking stick, she pointed to something on the ground. At first, Kara didn't even see it, camouflaged as it was against the other weeds. But gradually she was able to make out six green petals splayed across the ground, as though a flower had decided to spread out its arms and take a nap.

“Do you know what this does?” Grace asked.

Kara shook her head. It did seem vaguely familiar, though. Perhaps her mother had taught her about it at some point and she had forgotten? She tugged at a cloud of memory but it slipped away.

“Watch,” Grace said.

She picked up a beetle from an overhanging tangle of purple vines and placed it next to the splayed leaves. The
beetle hesitated a moment, its instincts telling it not to proceed, until Grace poked it with a stick and forced it onto the first petal.

The petals clamped together into a bell-shaped dome as large as Kara's head, then rose into the air on a single shoot and slowly began to spin.

“It's a trap,” said Grace. “The beetle thinks it's still just going about its life and . . .”

Like a flash of lightning in Kara's brain:
lost things hanging from the branches
.

“. . . doesn't realize the truth . . .”

More flashes. One after the other.

People
.

Mouths agape
.

Something wrong with their heads
.

“. . . until it's too late.”

Slithering
.

Screams
.

Taff
.

“My brother,” Kara said. “He's in trouble. I have to go home.”

“Do you?” asked Grace.

“Yes!” But another voice, a voice that was her own but different, stronger, said, “No. The boy at home isn't Taff at all.”

Remember what it eats
.

“Lost,” Kara murmured. “It eats things that are lost.”

The farm is not your home
.

Remember what it eats
.

“What's happening to me?” asked Kara. “I feel like my head is being torn apart.”

Grace noticed something past Kara's shoulder. “You have visitors,” she said. “I'll leave you to it.” She paused and added, “See you soon!” before vanishing into the Fringe.

Kara turned. Her family stood behind her.

“Come home, Kara,” said Father. “We need you.”

“It's time to prepare dinner,” said Mother.

“I got it to work!” Taff exclaimed, beaming. “My
threshing machine! Don't you want to see?”

Mother reached out her hands and Kara took a step forward, longing to fold herself in those lilac-scented arms and forget about this whole thing, but then . . .

The farm is not your home remember what it eats
.

. . . she saw a younger version of her mother hanging from a tree, jerking as stone after stone struck her.

“You're not you,” Kara said with grim certainty. “You're dead.”

Mother straightened her back and sighed deeply.

“I don't have to be,” she said. “Stay with us, and we can live like this forever.”

Remember . . .

(Mary. That's Mary's voice!)

. . . what it eats. The things you've lost
.

“Stay with us, Moonbeam,” said Father.

Imogen. She has me right now
.

“Don't go, sister!” exclaimed Taff.

She's in my mind
.

“Stop it,” Kara said. “None of this is real!”

Mother shrugged. “Real is what we make it. Come back to the farm, Kara. Forget all this foolishness.”

“My brother needs me,” Kara said. She looked at the boy wearing Taff's face. “My
real
brother.”

The Taff-thing winced as though Kara had struck him, and a seam of nothingness zigzagged across his cheek, revealing the trees behind him.

“Mother,” the Taff-thing said, jamming his fingers into the crack in his face. “Look what she did!”

“Is this what you want?” Mother asked Kara. “To hurt your brother?”

“I want to save him!”

Mother's arm vanished up to the elbow. A sizable piece of Father's torso disappeared as well.

“I'm very disappointed in you,” said the Mother-thing. “You could have had me back again.”

“You're wrong,” Kara said. “My mother is gone forever.”

Her family vanished.

Where a path leading back to the village should have been, a swirling nothingness expanded like a spreading stain across the horizon. Kara watched it approach, and in a few moments it took her.

K
ara opened her eyes.

She felt the hunger first, gnawing and implacable.
How long have I been here? And where
is
here, exactly?
Kara opened her eyes wider but her surroundings remained hazy and unclear.

They've been closed too long. I have to give them time before they work again
.

She heard vague sounds, dim and muffled. At first Kara thought her ears, like her eyes, needed time to recover, but this was not the case; there was something
stuffed inside them. Kara raised a hand, even this small motion difficult in her weakened state, and took hold of a fleshy, tentacle-like form protruding from her left ear. She yanked it away, feeling suddenly nauseous as the tentacle, much longer than she thought it would be, slid out of her ear with a popping sound and released a stream of warm fluid. Before she lost her nerve Kara repeated this action with the right ear, and immediately fell to the ground. Pain shot though her left knee.

Kara didn't mind. Pain was good. Pain meant she was alive.

She lay there for a few minutes until her vision began to work again and the foggy shapes of her surroundings came into focus.

She was in a small pit. Luminescent moss, pulsing with red light, covered the walls. The opening of the pit, while not far up, was well out of jumping range, and the moss, warm to the touch, provided no handholds. Kara glimpsed her reflection in a puddle of water: She was
dirty and bedraggled, but definitely no older than twelve.

Four years of my life. All a lie
.

Her memory—her true memory—had begun to return to her in random images. A rabbit on a bicycle. An old woman with a sack. Keys and dolls in the treetops. These images were more confusing than helpful, but it didn't matter. She remembered the most important thing just fine: Taff was here, and he needed her help.

Kara heard movement behind her. The two tentacles she had torn from her ears were slowly rising through the air, returning to something—or someone—on the surface.

No time to think. Might not get this chance later
.

Leaping into the air, Kara caught one of the tentacles with two hands. It sank beneath her weight, and for a moment she feared it would collapse altogether, but then it righted itself and began to lift Kara toward the opening above them. She waited until she was being pulled across the earth before relinquishing her grasp. The tentacles
continued onward toward some unknown source.

Unsteadily, Kara rose to her feet.

In every direction her surroundings were obscured by swirling fog—not gray and cloudy, but dark red like the flesh of a dragonfruit. The air smelled of far too many things at once. Closing her eyes, Kara used her
wexari
training to pull the confusing medley of scents apart and pinpoint particulars: cinnamon-laced pumpkin pie, sandalwood soap, the mustiness of a seldom-opened trunk. Taken apart, the smells were common, even comforting—but their combined presence disturbed her.