Bones of Faerie03 - Faerie After by Janni Lee Simner Page A

while we have light.” We paced the room together but found nothing that might lead to a way out. At last I sat with my back to the wall. Allie set the glowing stone and wine skin in front of us before she sank wearily down beside me.
    I kept my dead hand carefully in my lap. I wouldn’t let Nys melt it again. “You need sleep after a healing,” I told Allie. “I’ll keep watch.”
    Allie laced her fingers back together, stopped herself, and pressed her hands firmly against her thighs. “The healing isn’t done. Nys will be back. I don’t want him taking me over again while I sleep.”
    “I won’t—” I couldn’t promise to stop Nys from using glamour again. I was no more able to protect Allie nowthan I’d been with my hand stuck in the wall. Helplessness and anger brought a sour taste to my mouth. “Allie, what did Nys make you heal?” A faint hope: might he let us go, when the healing was through?
    Allie twisted a lock of loose hair around her fingers. “What do you think?”
    “Radiation poisoning?”
    “They call it fire fever here. There’s so much of it. I only had the strength for two patients—the worst of them—though there were more than a dozen in the room. It’s a good thing Caleb taught me a little about how to heal fire fever after he saved your mom. It’s so much trickier than other healings. A year ago I couldn’t have done it.”
    “Why can’t their healers do it?” They’d have more experience than Allie.
    “I don’t think the faerie folk have any more healers. Maybe they all died in the War. I hope they all died during the War, because if they didn’t, they probably died healing afterward. That would be bad.” She twisted her hair tighter and tighter. “I’m not stupid, you know. I understand how important rest is, but I don’t think I can sleep, and even if I do, sleep will be worse than staying awake, because if I dream …”
    “Maybe you’ll dream of home.” If Nys were hereright now, I’d go for his eyes again, no matter the risk. If he was going to hurt someone, he should have hurt me. I felt the green seeds in my pocket, protecting me still. What use were they, if I was the only one they protected? Surely the quia tree hadn’t given me seeds just for that.
    The only seeds I’ve known before with such strength and will to life came from the Realm’s First Tree
. Karin’s words—but if I worried about Karin now, too, I might crumble away beneath the knowledge of all those I couldn’t keep safe.
I must tell you that story, and soon
, Karin had said.
    Allie had twisted her hair around her fingers, so tightly the skin turned white around it. I put my hand over both of hers, stopping her. She looked up at me, asking for—what?
    “You know Karin’s story,” I said abruptly. “The one about the First Tree and the quia seeds.”
    “Well, sure, but—”
    “Could you tell it to me?” Maybe telling the story would take Allie away from this place, at least for a little while, the way Mom’s stories once did for me. If I couldn’t take her out of here entirely, I could do that much.
    “Now?” Allie narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “You’re trying to distract me, aren’t you?”
    “Yes.” I unwrapped her hair from around her fingers. “But I want the story, too. Anything we know about the seeds might help later.”
    Allie rubbed her fingers where the hair had dug in. “I can’t tell it as well as Karin or Caleb.”
    “That’s okay. Just tell it as best you can.”
    “All right. I remember how Karin started it, at least.” Allie tugged the ribbon from what remained of her ragged braid. “She said the story was from when Faerie was new, and the human world that would follow little more than a dream. Dad says that can’t be right, because humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years and Faerie isn’t older than that, but Karin says there are many ways of measuring time. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that when the story