Chapter One

The Cliffside

The moss met Fen’s feet before he was properly awake, cool and deep, giving under each step, the first thing the morning ever handed him. It grew over everything along this stretch of the Wall: the stone underneath, the old ridges where the ground had cracked and shouldered itself up over slow years of weather, the soft slopes that carried you from one level to the next. Before the sun had climbed clear of the dawnward edge the moss held the whole night’s dew in its millions of small beads, and for a little while the plateau went bright enough to sting. Light caught and thrown back from every blade at once. Then the warmth came and drank it, and the brightness sank away, and the air turned green and sweet and close, wet stone and growing things. Nowhere else in the world smelled like this. He had nothing to set it against, and needed nothing. This was home.

He had been awake since the stars were still out.

He moved through the dark house by touch and by order: ember-pot, then water, then food. The old acorn shell had been two rooms for as long as he could remember: the main one where they ate and kept what they owned, and the small back room where Lira slept. His own bedroll lay folded against the far wall and pushed aside, squared off in the dark before any light had reached the door. He hadn’t told his hands to do it; they had gone ahead without him, the way they did most mornings. Habit. He had a lot of them.

He fed the ember-pot until his antennae caught the first wisp of steam off the clay dish above it, then unwrapped the lichenloaf from its leaf and tore it into pieces. Three days old, which in lichenloaf was a virtue: somewhere past tough and tasteless it came round again to almost good, a faint nutty sweetness that only age could coax out of it. He laid the pieces on a broad leaf beside the warming water and shook a pinch of spore dust over all of it from the pouch on the shelf. Spore dust went on everything. Sorrel said it tasted like dirt. Sorrel was wrong.

From the back room came a sound like a small creature trying to talk gravity out of something. A shuffle, a thump, the particular thrash of someone losing an argument with a blanket that had its own ideas about keeping them.

“Food’s ready,” Fen said.

Lira didn’t walk in. She appeared, as if she’d been moving at speed somewhere else and the doorway had merely got in the way. The pale lavender-silver filaments on her head stood out in every direction, falling into her eyes and springing back when she shoved at them, and she was talking before those eyes were properly open.

“I’m going to find Sorrel. She said yesterday she’d show me this thing near the —”

“Breakfast first.”

“I’ll eat when I get back.”

“Lira.”

She sat. She ate the lichenloaf in three bites and hardly tasted one of them, her antennae already swung toward the door, telling the whole room out, now, this instant with every fiber. Fen set a cup of warm water in front of her and she drank it down like someone running out of time.

“Can I go now?”

She was already up, already reaching for the shelf where the seed-pod canteens were kept, the narrow good ones, the ones made for carrying. The shelf was high. It had been hung when their parents were still here and Lira came up to half of what she did now, and neither of them had ever got round to moving it. She rose onto her toes, fingers reaching, and Fen caught the small wrong thing in it: the lift that came a moment too early, her heels off the floor before the stretch should have taken them up.

He stepped in and brought the canteen down for her, and held it out.

Lira took it. Her eyes went to the shelf and back, and her jaw set, but she let it lie. Today, anyway.

“Take water,” Fen said.

“I know.”

“You forgot yesterday.”

“Yesterday it rained.”

She grinned at him, the grin that meant you are ridiculous and I love you for it, and was out the door before he could add one more thing to the list of what she might do differently.

He stood in the doorway and watched her go: already at a run, the bright pale shape of her cutting across the moss fields with her filaments streaming. She ran flat out and trusted the ground to be there when her feet came down, which was a thing Fen had never learned to do. His antennae followed her, and his stinging eyes after them, until the low sun came off the dew in a sheet of glare, and by then she was past the first row of houses and gone.

He cleaned because it wanted cleaning. Swept the floor with a bundle of dried grass, put the last of the lichenloaf away, ran a finger along the ember-pot’s clay lining feeling for cracks. The house held up well enough. He’d patched the roof twice already this season where the leaf cover had worn thin. But it was old, and old things worked loose, and if he didn’t go looking for the loose ones no one else would.

His errands took him through the middle of town, which in Briar was no journey at all. Sixty souls, give or take, and most errands passed through the center whether they meant to or not. Cookfire smoke went up thin and pale from the ember-pots, and the first voices of the day came to him across the moss: someone calling a name, someone laughing at a thing that had likely been funny yesterday and would be funny again tomorrow. He stopped at the dew-stones to fill the storage pods, the worn basins where the dew gathered each morning, to be scooped out with seed-pod ladles and carried home.

Hemlock had got there first, an old Sprellen whose antennae had gone pale at the tips, with opinions on everything and most of them delivered at length and none of them asked for. This morning’s was the mites, into someone’s root stores again for all the mending of the pens. “A latch isn’t a repair,” Hemlock told him, told the basins, told the morning at large. “A latch is an apology. You know what keeps mites out? Care.” Fen made the right sounds in the right places and kept ladling. The sun came across the nearest basin at a low angle, and for a breath the water broke open into light, gold and white trembling over the wet stone, there and gone. He tipped the ladle, filled the second pod, and moved on.

Tansy caught him by the cookfire circle with a clay pot in her hands, something that smelled strongly of ground fungus and concern.

“For you and Lira,” she said, and pressed it into his hands. The pot was warm against his palms. “You’re both too thin.”

“We’re fine, Tansy.”

“You eat lichenloaf three meals a day, Fennel. I’ve seen you.”

He didn’t argue. Tansy was old enough to be his grandmother, and she treated him with the particular gentleness people keep for children who are raising children; somewhere in that first year he had stopped trying to wave it off.

“Thank you,” he said, and meant it.

“Come and eat with us tonight. Both of you. The door’s always open.”

“I know.”

She pressed his arm, a quick warm pressure, and went on toward the cookfire. He kept his eyes on her until she reached it. Briar looked after its own. It always had.

He saw Lira once more before the evening.

She was with Sorrel in the low brambles at the dawnward edge of town, where the brush grew thick and the ground tipped gently toward the cliff-step. Lira’s laugh came through the brush first, the one that began somewhere in her chest and came out like a door thrown wide; then Sorrel underneath it, quieter, pointed, the two of them knotted up in something plainly urgent that plainly had nothing to do with him.

He nearly walked on. But the trail bent in close to their clearing, and through a gap in the bramble stalks the light caught his eye, faint and blue, pulsing soft between Lira’s hands.

She had a broken stem cupped there. The top half hung from the snapped base, and she held the break between her palms, and the glow rose out of it, blue, soft and alive, the color of deep water with something kindling under it. The fibers were knitting. The stem drew straight again, the break closing fiber over fiber, and Lira wore the quiet, certain look she got when she was doing the one thing that came to her as easily as breath.

And Sorrel was watching. Not on edge, not casting round the clearing for who might see. Chin on a drawn-up knee, the two white streaks on her forehead bright against the dark fur, her whole small frame tipped toward Lira’s hands, and perfectly still.

Fen’s antennae drew back, stiff.

Not at Lira. At Sorrel, who had watched Lira use her Thread out in the open, easy, glad of it, where anything might have seen. Fen spent his days keeping that light quiet. Sorrel had spent an afternoon admiring it. She encourages it. The glow faded. The stem held. Lira set the plant down and said something that tipped Sorrel into laughing, and it was over. Two friends in a clearing again, shut around a closeness with no room in it for him.

He left them to it.

The afternoon had gone amber when Lira turned up at the door again, mid-sentence as always.

“Come on. The light’s good tonight.”

The cliffside. Their ritual.

The duskward cliff was Lira’s place. She’d found it years back, the spot where the Wall’s edge gave way to open air, a broad shelf of mossy stone that ran out just far enough to sit on with your legs over nothing and the wind coming up cold from below. She had hauled Fen out to it the first time, breathless with the finding of it, and through doing it again and again it had become theirs. Hers first; then theirs. In the high quiet of it he had always been the guest.

They went out through the last of the afternoon, across moss fields already giving up their brightness as the sun slid toward the rim of the world. Lira led. She always led on this walk, and Fen let her have it. She talked the whole way: the tunnel Sorrel had turned up in the brambles, deeper than anyone had guessed; the loose mite, which she had of course already named, though the name went past Fen before he caught it; had he seen it, and no he hadn’t, because he never looked at anything properly.

“I look at things,” Fen said.

“You look for things. That’s different. You’re always looking for danger and damage and things that need mending.”

“Those are things.”

“You look for the wrong things.” She walked backward a few steps to face him, sure-footed on the moss without looking down. “You should look for things that are beautiful.”

“I’m looking at the sunset.”

“Only because I pointed you at it.”

She wasn’t wrong.

The ledge opened in front of them, mossy at its edges and bare stone down the middle, sun-warmed all day and still giving the heat back into the cooling air. The drop tugged at the soles of his feet. The Wall fell away below into more distance than his eyes could hold, canopy under canopy, going down and blue into dusk, loud with the small far sounds of a world that had no bearing on theirs. What rose out of it came up cool and damp and smelled of distance.

Lira sat at the very lip, feet over the drop, her place, always. Fen sat a body’s length back, near enough to catch her, not near enough to have to look down. She knew it. She never said a word about it.

For a while neither of them spoke. The ritual ran to a rhythm: come in loud, settle into quiet, let the evening do the rest. Lira watched the sky. Her hands lay in her lap and her fingers had begun the thing they sometimes did, threading something invisible between them, pulling at nothing, winding and unwinding a fine strand of air, her mind clearly some long way off. She’d done it as long as Fen could remember: a fidget, the way another might jog a foot or worry at a seam, a body that wouldn’t quite hold still. He had never thought twice about it.

A tuft of moss grew at the ledge’s lip beside her, one pale stalk standing up from the middle of it. Fen let his gaze go out over the drop, the layered green below softening into haze. When he looked back, a small smile was just leaving Lira’s face, quiet and private. The stalk beside her had unrolled a new leaf, barely opened, taking the last of the warmth. But it was her his eyes went to, not the plant, and the moment passed.

The light changed. The sun sat low now, dropping toward the place where the Wall ran on ahead of them, toward the dusk, where the world kept going further than anyone in Briar had ever thought to follow it. The sky went to colors with no proper names of their own: the gold-pink of pale seedpods, the deep amber of old resin, and under them, down near the horizon, a thickening band of blue-grey that seemed to be holding its breath.

Then, just as the sun went under the far edge of the Wall, a flash. Quick, bright, unmistakably purple. It flared once at the horizon and was gone.

Lira’s antennae shot straight up.

“Did you see it?”

Fen blinked. “See what?”

“The flash! The purple — right there, right at the edge.” She was up on her knees, leaning out, her whole body turned to the place it had been, antennae spread wide and trembling. “It happened, Fen. Did you see it?”

He had seen something, a flicker of color, quick and brief, at the very moment the sun went. But he’d been looking at Lira and not the sky, so what he had truly caught was the flash thrown back in her eyes: the iridescence doubling the purple and holding it an instant longer, her face lit with it before the light let go.

“I saw it,” he said.

“That’s the third time this season. Third. It’s happening more often.” She sat back on her heels, grinning at the sky, at the memory taking shape. “I’m going to figure out what causes it.”

“It’s the light doing something with the air.”

“You don’t know that.”

“What else would it be?”

“Something wonderful. Something nobody’s worked out yet.” Her antennae came forward, her eyes wide, her jaw set in a way that put him in mind of something he couldn’t place.

The light thinned. The sky cooled toward grey and then toward dark, and the first stars came out, faint far gleams that might have been anything at all, and were, as far as Fen had ever known, only the night arriving, the way it always did.

Lira leaned into him. Not on purpose. She only tipped until her weight came to rest against his shoulder, warm and certain. He shifted to take her without thinking about it. His antennae had been reading the small movements of the evening, the cooling air, the dew starting to bead. They eased into something slower. Evening. Home. His sister beside him.

“Same time tomorrow?” she said.

“If the sky cooperates.”

“The sky always cooperates. You just don’t always look.”

They sat on a while. The wind came up from below with cold in it and the smell of wild places, and the last of the light was nearly gone when a shadow went over them.

Fast. Overhead. Gone before his eyes could fix on it. But his antennae caught the wake of it, a shove of displaced air, the pressure of something that had crossed over the cliff edge with speed and with purpose. He looked up. The sky was empty. Dark and still and with nothing in it to explain what he’d felt.

“What?” Lira said.

“Nothing.” He was still searching the dark overhead. His antennae had pressed flat to his head; he hadn’t told them to. “Thought I saw something.”

“A bird?”

“Maybe.”

“A big one?”

He looked at her. She was watching him with the easy, untroubled curiosity of someone who trusted the world to be safe because so far it always had been. Her antennae sat relaxed. Her hands were still. Whatever had crossed the sky hadn’t touched her evening at all.

“No,” he said. “Nothing. Come on — it’s getting cold.”

They walked home through the last of the dusk. The moss fields had gone dark and soft underfoot, and Briar’s cookfires were already lit, small points of orange where neighbors had drawn together for the night. Somewhere on the walk Lira’s hand found his, not reaching for it, just there, the way it used to be when she was small and the dark was bigger than she was. He held it and said nothing, and she didn’t take it back, and the moment passed so gently that by the time he thought to mark it the evening had already closed around them, warm and familiar and exactly the right size.