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Nara wondered, if they found their way back to the cavern of the Guide, if he would be there again, standing rigid against the steep wall, waiting for the people to make their offers and ask for guidance. Although she wondered at the guidance given, and whether the stone would be returned to the people or the Keeper would continue to take them away. Or the other stone men.
She shivered at the idea, the stones tight in her hand. Haven closed his arms around her again, resting his chin on the top of her head. There was no indication from the stones what was to come or whether there was danger surrounding them, but as they stood together in silence, a weaver called in the distance.
Haven closed his arms tighter around her.
“Are they coming to us, or are we to go to them?”
“Do you want to return to them?” he asked.
She shook her head. Although she wanted to see her mother’s face again. It had burned anew into her memory as somewhat disappointed, and she hoped her mother hadn’t been disappointed in the lives she had lived. Particularly when she had left the wren alone with her father, possibly with whatever curse he had acquired. “It is not our curse,” she repeated.
Haven did not respond, and Nara knew it wasn’t worth responding to. She might be wrong; there might be no one that could tell her what the world was to be.
“If I don’t have my pouch when I die, will I not have it in the next life?” she asked.
“Will there be another?” he asked.
She looked up as he released his hold on her, his hands moving easily along her arm and squeezing hers.
“We haven’t found the danger here,” she replied, looking to the tree, and yet they had found so much of it. Perhaps this life was something different. They had remembered things differently. Was this life not to kill but to help create? The snow continued to drift through the crack in the wall of the cavern, and it was then Nara noticed it ran to the floor. As she took a step towards it, her feet still bare, the cool ridges of stone pressed into her soles.
The cavern floor appeared in many ways as the others had, all the ones the people lived in with concentric circles of stone, slight ridges that caught the light and were all too real beneath her feet. Was this a sign that it was a gift from the stone? And yet the people feared the stone, or at least those who had taken their sacred stones from them. Nara squeezed her hand around her own. It felt odd that there were so many in her hand, and yet it was right.
In her past lives, she had felt as though she might have lost some, or that for whatever reason the number was not right, yet she knew it to be. The conflicting feelings were more real now when she thought back over them, and she wondered just how much of their past lives were different. She tugged at Haven’s sleeve, and he turned his deep blue eyes her way. They were the same—he was the same, even if she doubted the sword. She understood the man was the same, looked the same, and she wondered if the woman with her mother’s face might not have recognised something in them. The man with her father’s had not.
“It is time to leave,” she said, although whether she meant this life or the cavern, she didn’t know. She only knew they could not stay where they were.
Nara shivered as the cold air closed around her when they reached the edge of the cavern, the stone almost warm beneath her feet. Or were her feet numb? She looked back at the tree as she held the stones tight in her hand. Others would come. Others would find it, as Haven had found the others, and yet she knew there were other trees out there that the stone would search out.
As they stepped out into the snow, it didn’t feel quite so cold. The usually white sky, even with the bright light, appeared more blue, and Nara could make out the horizon more easily. The sun felt as though there was a little more warmth in it.
Nara wondered if finding the tree, allowing the stone to take it back, had been enough to do what needed to be done here. Maybe they did not need to find a monster. Something called in the distance, something large, and Haven’s hand squeezed hers. She glanced up at him beside her, with his sword still within its sheath, her own just visible beneath it.
There was not enough to fear here to draw a sword, yet how many times had they walked through a land with no idea of what lay before them with sword in hand? Ready.
“I’m tired,” Haven murmured, as though answering the question she hadn’t asked. She could see it now that she looked at him in the bright light. The stoop of his shoulders, the reluctant steps.
“When did you last eat?” she asked.
He shook his head, and even that movement was slow. Another weaver call in the distance had them looking, although she couldn’t make out anything.
She wanted to curl in his arms and stay in the moment for longer. She turned back, looking for the stone structure they had just walked from, wondering if there was a dry and warm place they could settle for a time. But the snow had fallen over the stone, and it was near invisible to the eye. Other than the dark crevice that she knew led back to the tree.
She squeezed the stones tight in her hand, still no idea of what was to come or where they should go. She was reminded of the Mer again. And she wondered how many glimpses of their first life they might see before they understood what was behind this.
“What if we went straight to the fire tree?” she asked.
“What if it is not there?” Haven was looking into the distance then, as though he had seen something she could not.
“Do you feel it?”
He looked back at her with concern and shook his head, but despite the weariness and the cold pressing in on them, he tugged her forward.
She had so many questions to ask him, but her trust in him stopped her. He would tell her when he understood where he was going or what it was that pulled him forward, although he had denied the pull. She had only felt it briefly, moments of overwhelming fear that the danger was close, that their purpose was close. It usually followed that one of them would die, and yet they had found neither the reason for their being in this life nor the fire tree.
Maybe they had more trees to find. Perhaps their purpose here was very different. Haven dragged Nara through the snow, her legs cold and numb as she tried to keep up with his too-fast pace. She usually could, she thought, despite the bare feet on the hard-packed snow. Her feet sank down a little, but not enough to slow her down, other than that she couldn’t really feel them anymore.
She was too busy looking down and trying to hold tight to his hand. At one stage, she thought her grip was slipping, his fingers pulling away from her, and before she could call out to him, he stopped. Almost lost in the snow in the middle of an icy field, with no sight of the stone expanses or mountains or caverns around them, stood a tree.
How Haven had seen it, she didn’t know, and the stones seemed warmer in her hand. It appeared just as the stone trees, still and white, and yet she could see the tinge of green through the fine layer of snow covering each leaf.
Haven reached out and carefully wiped the snow from one to reveal the brilliant colour.
“How?” Nara wondered if the stones, the embers that had floated from the cavern after the fire, could have influenced this. Something moved at the base of the tree, rustling in the snow, but other than the snow falling down, she could see nothing. What other wonders were hidden in this world?
Releasing her hold on Haven’s hand, Nara stepped forward and pressed her palm to the trunk. It was cold, certainly not stone.
“How does it grow?” she asked, her mind racing with more questions. How was it here in the first place?
She turned and looked over the landscape behind her. How far had they come from the stone tree and the shadows and the stone creatures? Might this world melt away in the summer? She remembered the fine layer of frost that would coat the world around the mansion, although they had not had snow. As the days cleared, and the summer set in, the frost was all forgotten by the ground and the crops and the people who had resented walking through the slippery surface to the river for water early in the morning.
Were they here at the wrong time? Were they here when the world might be different?
Something cried out in the distance. Whether weaver or something else, Nara wasn’t sure. The ground shook a little around them as though the stone was moving again, and snow fell from the leaves to reveal the green beauty. Nara smiled for the first time in what felt like too long.
Maybe they had time in this life.
The cold closed around her, and she shivered. In the distance, she thought she could smell smoke. She stopped, taking in the changing landscape around her. Were there tips of green poking through the snow?
“Nara?” Haven asked, but there was something of an edge to his voice, and she pulled her gaze from the melting snow to his worried features. “Do you feel hot?”
She shook her head as the wind picked up her hair, and the first embers fluttered by. She felt herself for the first time in this life, but the stones were silent as she looked down at her hands, glowing with the flame of the fire tree. She looked back at Haven, tears running down his cheeks as he reached for her, but she could not feel him, no matter how hard she tried to hold him in return.
She could only hope this wasn’t the last life—or if it was, that he wasn’t far behind her.
Haven and Sunshine return in Silk and Smoke – available June 2024
