Chapter 25
Saffron
The ground was far below, impossibly far, and Saffron knew that touching it would be like landing on rusty nails. Time pulsed, dilating, retracting, moving backwards. The in-between was soft, cooling, full of lavender shadows and torchlight. She was neither fish nor fowl, as her Oona used to say. Even now, hallucinating with pain, it didn’t make any sense.
She couldn’t see the villagers who carried her, only the whirling spill of stars overhead. They winked like the eyes of old and patient gods. She smelled sage, pine. The drums were in perfect tune with her heart. It was steadying, reminding it of its proper natural rhythm.
Elisande was suddenly there, leaning over so that her pale face obliterated the stars. When she moved, they streaked, like a crown. She wore an antlered beaded headdress.
Saffron wondered where Jane was, what they had done to her. She found it mattered, and it was curious enough to distract her for a moment—no one mattered except for Oona and Killian for so long now. Trust her to care for a girl made of glass. She’d shatter before long. Alliance, or not.
Saffron’s tattoo sent unexpected electrical shocks through her veins, stealing breath, thought, everything. Time lapsed again. The sky was impossible: like layers of melted rock candy. Saffron was a dandelion gone to seed, floating on the breath of a child’s wish. She tasted bitter herbs: milk thistle, wormwood.
Elisande was the first to rise and her skin glowed faintly. She scowled at Saffron. “Get up.”
Though she felt insubstantial and odd, Saffron found she could stand for the first time in days. Her tattoo bled darkness, the skin around it bright as sunsticks in a dark stairwell. She was still in the Badlands but the colours were wrong: amplified and alien. She couldn’t tell if it was day or night, the light seemed to be coming from all over and the shadows were long. She couldn’t help but choose paints for an imaginary canvas: cerulean, ochre, violet.
Anya snapped her fingers in Saffron’s face. “Don’t get distracted here,” she ordered sharply. “It’ll kill you.”
She blinked slowly. “Where exactly is here?”
“The Underworld.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “That doesn’t sound promising. If you wanted to kill me, a dagger’s easier.”
Elisande shrugged. “A place is a place. You just need a map.”
“And a big stick,” Anya added with a flash of an incendiary smile. The light caught on the copper wire wrapped around her staff.
Elisande nodded once. “Follow me.”
Saffron looked dubious. “Kid, what are you? Like eleven?”
“Thirteen.”
“Thirteen? Shouldn’t you be doing whatever passes for homework out here?”
“If I was doing that, who would save you? Who would fetch your soul back?”
“It’s not my soul. It’s this bloody tattoo that jacking hurts.”
Elisande rolled her eyes. “And that’s why you need me to save you.”
Elisande took them down into a crevice with steep narrow steps carved into the stratified clay until it opened onto that grass stretched out into a green and gold sea all around. Saffron followed seeing as she had no other choice. Her arm hurt too much and she was too painfully alert to be drugged. Nothing was hazy or nebulous, it was all sharp light and shadows. And while it felt strange to trust her safety to a little girl, there was no denying Elisande knew what she was doing. And Anya treated the younger Feral with marked respect. Saffron couldn’t drudge up that kind of reverence but she might be able to keep her mouth shut. Maybe.
The leaf mask was still limp but it was also superimposed with a lime-and-mint glowing version, as if remembering what it ought to be. It pulsed with promise, vines curling like a lover’s fingers through her braids, berries red as lips after kissing, thorns hiding in wait because what was a kiss without a hint of teeth?
Anya held up a hand. Saffron didn’t see anything dangerous, just that green grass and the purple mountain. The clouds made shapes over their heads: griffin, fox, sunflower. Jane would know what they signified, but Anya wasn’t looking at them either, she was studying the ground. Saffron tensed, expecting snakes, scorpions, fire ants. We’re there even insects in the Underworld?
“Don’t let the shadows touch you,” Anya snapped.
Saffron stepped back, feeling ridiculous. “Shadows? Really? I was expecting monsters.”
Elisande slid her an exasperated glance, the kind only a thirteen-year-old could manage, shaman powers or not. “What else is a shadow that isn’t attached to anything? Use your eyes, Elysian.”
The shadows were dark as oil slicks, slithering and slippery as they closed the distance between them. “What do they do?” she asked, hopping onto a boulder. Darkness pooled at the rounded edges.
“Drain you,” Elisande replied, pulling a painted flute from where it was tucked into her wide embroidered belt. “Turn you into food.”
“And you’re going to play it a lullaby?” Saffron snapped.
“Not exactly.”
Elisande fit a porcupine quill from one of her pouches into one end of the flute and then blew hard in the other. The quill pierced the shadow oozing over the rocks towards Saffron. There was a small sound—squeaky and scratchy and awful, and then the shadow lay limp.
“Give me a knife, anything!” Saffron shouted as more shadows converged, moving over the plains like a dark and dreadful wind. “I have good aim.”
“Only a weapon made from this place will work,” Anya replied. She somersaulted into a patch of red poppies, the end of her staff slamming into a long thin shadow sliding into the spot where she’d been standing.
Saffron suddenly missed the city with its curfews, taggers, rats, and water police. At least she had daggers there and Killian at her back. Here there were only Feral girls and hungry shadows—and a strange pale tree down behind a pile of boulders. It was smooth as glass, without leaves or buds.
Saffron leapt to the nearest rock. The boulders didn’t stop the shadows, of course, but it gave her a few extra seconds, a bit more ground for them to cover. They bubbled around her, forming spikes and teeth and claws.
“Stay there!” Anya shouted, her staff moving so fast it looked like it was shooting off copper sparks.
“Like hell,” Saffron muttered. She already owed them too much.
Something touched her ankle.
It wasn’t a bite or a rake of claws as expected, but soft and strange as a cat’s tongue. Still, she stumbled, falling to one knee where her foot went numb. Fatigue leeched up her leg, soft and sinister as a drowning death. She crawled towards the tree, dragging her useless leg. It may as well have belonged to someone else entirely for all it responded.
Porcupine quills fell in a sharp rain as Elisande made her way towards Saffron. She didn’t see the bull-shaped shadow behind her, licking at her heels. She’d feel it soon enough; it was big enough to drop her unconscious. “Behind you!” Saffron shouted, even as Anya skewered it. The air smelled like fire and pennies. The shadows reared up like wild, stampeding horses.
Saffron reached up for the closest branch, hoping it was strong enough to use as weapon.
“Ask its permission!” Elisande warned her, between breaths on her porcupine flute.
“Can I have a damn branch to kill these damn shadows,” Saffron muttered even though it was clear there was no Dryad hiding in the tree, or Protectorate soldiers to haul her away. Still, years of Oona’s schooling had her adding a begrudging “Please.” If she’d had the tobacco Oona had given her for an offering to the Spirit Forest, she’d have left a pinch of it too. But her pockets were empty, here on the other side.
She didn’t wait for a reply because she didn’t speak tree. The branch cracked loudly, startling yellow and purple birds from a bush of papery leaves. The tree pulsed, uncomfortably like a heart. Something red flared within it, but the liquid that oozed from the cut was thick and silvery.
A shadow touched the knee of her good leg. She pulled
hard on the branch, and the end was splintery; ragged more than pointed but it would have to do. She drove it into a shadow, and though the tiny inhuman screech made her smile grimly, the shadows kept coming, pouring like ink spilled on drawing paper. Saffron stabbed at them until her fingers were covered in what looked like soot and silver paint. She was out of breath and her festering arm burned with pain. The shadows faded, going grey.
Finally, finally, Elisande snapped her fingers. “This way, Elysian.”
It was now possible to clamber from stone to stone, or would have been, if Saffron could feel her legs. They prickled painfully but only her left leg would hold any weight, even leaning on the silvery thorn branch. Anya slipped an arm under her shoulder. “You’re a lot of work.”
“Then why are you helping me?” Saffron asked. Her neck was damp with sweat under her heavy braids, briars, and burrs.
“Rules of hospitality. And kindness.”
Saffron snorted. “I’m not Jane. I don’t believe in that type of kindness.” They finally came up against the mountain. Its heavier shadow swallowed the others. “How exactly is this going to heal an infected tattoo?”
Elisande and Anya exchanged an infuriatingly superior glance but Elisande only said: “You are in one of these caves.”
“I’m right here,” she muttered even though something close to recognition tingle along her spine. She wanted to believe it was only the feeling coming back into her legs. “I hate riddles.”
The mountain was a honeycomb of sand-coloured caves; some lit with candles, some dark and strange. Inside, Saffron saw a white horse, a black bear, a blue heron.
“Go on,” Elisande said. “Save yourself.”
Saffron stared at the mountain, for longer than she’d care to admit. Long enough that her legs started to work again, even if they did feel a little soft. She could pretend that’s what had made her pause instead of the fear batting its wings against her ribs. Anya started to look bored.
“Sorry my impending doom is taking so long,” Saffron snapped. It made her feel a little better. She thought about Oona and how thrilled she’d be with this adventure. About Killian and how he’d be scowling at her even now. It helped even more than venting her bad temper. Some kind of actual weapon would have been even better.
She started to climb, sand and pebbles scattering under her boots. The bear snapped its jaws at her and she carefully skirted that cave. Every so often, people stared out at her. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to help them. Since she wasn’t even sure how to help herself at this point, she kept climbing. The wind was warm and smelled of cinnamon and pepper and distant smoke. The sky was turning red and orange.
Blood ran from her tattoo, dripping from her fingertips. She stopped to rest, cradling her sore arm. There was more blood on the ground in front of her, scattered like seeds. It led into a crooked cave. Something moved inside. Saffron approached, fists raised. The person inside glanced up, eyes narrowed.
Saffron looked back at herself.
It gave her a brief moment of vertigo. But there was no denying the coppery skin, the black eyes, the scar on the collarbone from the time she slid off one of the bridges and landed on a rusted truck. She wore only a dress of iron chains wound through with ivy, thistles, and thorns. The Green Jack mask glittered like fireflies. Blood snaked down her arm.She was sure one was supposed to say something spiritual or wise, when confronted with oneself.
“What the jacking hell?”
In response, her twin snarled.
“If you bite me, I’m biting you back.” The surrealness of threatening herself with herself, was disorienting. She touched the chains gingerly. Her twin watched her with the same expression as the bear in the cave below. The iron was cold and slick. She yanked on it, hoping the bolts that secured to the wall were rusty. They weren’t. There wasn’t even a lock to pick. She shook them harder, frustrated. She eventually sat back on her heels, sweat running into her eyes. “I don’t get it.”
She poked her head over the ledge. Elisande was tiny at the bottom. Her antlers looked like tree branches in winter. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Open your eyes, Saffron Foxfire.”
“We hate her, right?” Saffron asked her twin. She could almost feel the chains on her own wrists. Thistles scratched her temples, stinging. The leaf mask was as impatient as she was. The wind changed, and she could smell the musty, wild smell of trapped animals.
There was mud on her twin’s feet, red dust under her nails. Paint on her side, just there under her ribs. “Stand up.” She remembered Elisande’s advice with the tree and added a belated “Please.”
Her twin stood slowly. A fox painted in russet and red ochre stretched from her back, under her ribs, with its head looking between her breasts. Elisande had used Saffron’s full name. Saffron was fairly certain she hadn’t had the strength to tell her what it was when they were first brought to the village.
“Fox for a Foxfire,” she said slowly. Elisande had porcupine quills and a deer headdress. Anya had white swan feathers tied to her staff. There were animals all around her, trapped in the caves. There were stories even in Elysium City of totems and people who turned into animals. Her grandmother still told those stories, passed down from her own grandmother.
“If I knew how to turn into an animal, don’t you think I would have done it by now?” She felt useless and furious and exhausted.
Her twin grabbed her wrist. Saffron froze. She wasn’t going to let herself be trapped in this cave too. But her twin only pulled Saffron’s hand, pressing her palm over the painted fox. Her twin stretched and contorted, her body racked with cramps. Leaves and white berries fell from the mask. She crushed them under her feet, fighting some internal battle. Saffron felt her own insides clench in sympathy. They gasped in unison.
And then skin turned to fur, teeth got smaller and shaper, hands became paws. Her twin landed on four feet, a fox lean and red as fire.
Saffron couldn’t help a breathless laugh. “Well, okay then.” Her tag was healing already. She laughed again, feeling better than she had in years. “Let’s get out of here.”
The climbed down the rough steps. Saffron couldn’t stop staring at the fox, even though it made her a little dizzy. At the bottom, Elisande smiled smugly at them. The fox barked once and then took off through the golden grass. Saffron didn’t call it back.
Anya tilted her head. “You’re supposed to keep your animal spirit tied to yourself.”
“Why would I do that?” Saffron said. “Ever seen a caged fox?” She’d seen them in the City, slinking down alleys or trapped in cages and gnawing at the bars with bloody gums. Jedekiah had considered animals for his sideshow but Saffron threatened to quit. His ridiculous dogs didn’t count.
Elisande smiled wider. “I told you she was strong enough once we broke the binding magic of the tattoo.”
Saffron was acutely aware of the lush and vibrant purple thistles, and goldenrod unfurling from the mask pushed back over her forehead. “Strong enough for what?” She asked, even though she already knew the answer.