Garden of Betrayal: Legends of the Aurora, #3

Part One

Invitation

Chapter 1 

The door materialized at sunrise. It hadn’t been there before and even now, Leaf couldn’t be certain it was there at all. She tipped her head, and it faded into the soft light. She stepped to the side and it disappeared all together. I must be tired, she thought, but, when she returned to center, the door reappeared, glowing orange in the dawn.

She closed her eyes and willed the vision away, but when she lifted her gaze, the door remained, stubborn as a dragon. Except now, a dagger of brilliant light streamed through the open door accompanied by the riotous cackle of squabbling gulls and the awkward flight of a beetle, its reddish-brown carapace ignited by the sun. Strange she thought. It bore a remarkable resemblance to a flying chestnut, except the last chestnut tree had perished seven summers past. She missed that old tree and the sweet nutty fruit it bore. The fearless bug drifted through the door on the sweet tones of a flute that raked against Leaf’s flesh. Slug would know what to do—if he could speak. Or move. Leaf shoved the thought aside as the lullaby washed over her, softening her tense muscles and easing her fear. The Songstress had finally reached out. She stepped forward and the door slammed shut. A heartbeat later, it shimmered and dissolved into the mossy bark. It had been a mirage. After all, glowing, orange doors don’t just appear at the base of enormous trees.

She sank to her knees, nearly crushing a toadstool in the process. In response, it jettisoned its spores and coated her in tiny fungi embryos. She puffed the dense layer of spores away and sighed. Forty-nine summers had come and gone, and this the fiftieth stood little chance against the frost that had already licked the edges of the burnishing leaves. Fifty summers of dodging suitors while honing her magic and sobbing at the base of Slug’s frozen form had strengthened her. She almost never summoned the lullaby and the Songstress who frightened her. Instead, she had formed her own connection to the magic flowing through the soil beneath her bare toes. When she thought about it, she realized she had always sensed the power, but magic had a dark side. If it were not for Slug, she would have permanently plugged her ears to the Songstress and her tantalizing lullaby, but Aurora had hinted at hope.

She brushed her fingers over the colorful band at her wrist. The tattered edge of a tapestry woven from Aurora’s hair and magical light was her connection to the Heart and the powerful Elemental who had once summoned her. If anyone knew the truth, it was Aurora, but even she didn’t have all the answers.

The wind came up, gathering leaves and spinning them in vibrant waves that slammed against her chest. They clung to her skin in cold, wet patches and she brushed them away. Her chest had healed long ago, but the stylized spiral inscription remained. Trolls didn’t normally bear the mark of the dragon, but Leaf felt she had earned the right to wear an inscription. She had begged Troika to inscribe her, but he had resisted. Finally, when she had threatened to carve her own flesh with a shard of pottery from her mother’s wheel, he had relented. But the dragon carried painful memories of his inscription, and he had tried one last time to dissuade her. She had insisted. They had done it—in secret. A spiral, uncoiling into disarray now marked the base of her throat. The pain had been exquisite.

Autumn was moving too quickly. It came and went each year in a flash of color that left her exhilarated and exhausted, but the snow would come. Like a relentless beast stalking the northern edges of Elvsmyr, winter always regained control. She knew she should be excited because snow time was troll time, but Leaf was not like the other trolls. She had been different from the heartbeat of her birth. She was tiny, half the size of her best friend, Smekk, and hideous. Her skin was too smooth and her hair refused to kink. It would lay there in soft waves against her back, shedding all attempts to twist it into troll knots, but it had undergone a transformation. Leaf had abandoned the darkness and chosen a life under the sun, and her dark locks had tarnished to copper further softened by golden highlights that matched her amber sun shield.

Amber held powerful magic. Magic so strong it could rip the blinding rays from the sun to allow trolls to move about in daylight. It had been an accidental discovery, one that had temporarily tied her to a false fate. She no longer worked the amber. Twig had taken over, and he was becoming quite famous for it. Elvsmyr’s nimble hero had completed his apprenticeship under Leaf’s father, Uredd, and moved on to a fate of his own choosing. Twig worked the amber into thin slices and encased the sharp edges in a bead of silver. Uredd had quickly tired of the repetitive work while Twig had found his niche. He embellished his sunshields with graceful twists and glittering gems, each a tiny treasure that had generated a new stampede to his parent’s trading post as trolls rushed to wear the latest style. He could still be found leaping across the meadow, his mouth agape and snapping up flies when the mood struck him. Twig would always be Twig, but he had found his fate in the magical stone and the fires of the forge. Leaf could have had that life, she should have wanted it, but she had chosen an uncertain path.

She traced her finger over the spiral on her chest. To her right, a sickly, yellow glow lit up the underside of a vine strangling a pine tree. Her blood ran cold and sprinkled prickled flesh down her arms. The wind shifted, whisking the eerie light away while all around her, the leaves applauded the coming of the sun. Leaf’s heart slowed, but the memories of that terrible morning had already begun.

Chapter 2

All was calm. The Betrayed longed for the riot of a spring day or the sparkle of a shooting star to light the night with fire. Only that was not her fate. It hadn’t been her fate for a long time.

The tides were shifting, drawing magic from deep within the earth to bring the future to light. It could not come fast enough. The Betrayed was running out of time, a peculiar concept when one is immortal.

Beware, little sister. The beast is steeped in treachery.

Her words went unnoticed.

Time was a void, a massive maw opening up before her. Hurry, little sister, before it’s too late. She must find a way to reach her Champion before the madness spread.

Chapter 3

It was so long ago that Leaf sometimes wondered if she had dreamed the Great Fairy Battle, but then she would remember Slug, cold and trapped inside a deadly diamond spell, a spell cast by Azool, the feared blue fairy of Torv. Azool, the fairy who had tricked her mother, had hunted them down. Timid Gaven had made a lop-sided bargain with the heartless witch. As a trollkin, she had been sentenced to death by the elders of her village for the crime of bearing blue eyes, and her father had protected her as best he could. However, Lalman was weak. He had wasted his life in the fairy’s gambling den until he had buried himself in debt to the tiny beast. When Azool had had enough, she had created a trollkin from a few scraping of Lalman’s mole and powerful fairy magic. Doomed to care for an abomination in an unforgiving society, Lalman had spent the rest of his nights toiling in the peat bog until his body could finally withstand no more abuse.

Deaths were rare among the trolls. Most see endless nights, but they can, and sometimes do, die, but only the punishing abuse of grievous wounds will put an end to a trolls life, and even then, their tough bodies struggle to survive long after all hope has parted. Lalman had died after endless seasons of backbreaking work on the floor of their hovel with his head on Gaven’s lap and the stench of the truth he had kept from her hanging in the air.

When the village elders had banished her from Torv, Gaven had learned to play in the dangerous marsh, dangerous because fairies were known to linger in the trees. Gaven had nowhere else to go. Her plan had been to learn how to survive alone in the wild, a goal with little chance of success. The valleys were full of enemies. Foxes roamed freely, their jaws itching to snap onto the neck of a careless troll. It was inevitable that she end up in the deadly glare of a monster, just not the one she had expected. Azool had saved her. It had felt like fate, but if Gaven had known the price of accepting the blue fairy’s help, she might have chosen a quick death, but her will to live had always been strong.

Azool had taken her under her wing, taught her to hear the magic, and finally to bend it to her will until the ruthless beast had demanded payment, and Gaven, already tangled in the snare, had been trapped. She had been desperate for one final spell: invisibility and Azool knew it. With invisibility, Gaven would walk through the village, learn the ways of the trolls, and when she had gathered enough information, she would leave, never to be seen again. But Azool had been clever. The price she had demanded was Gaven’s first born daughter, a daughter Gaven felt she would never have as an abomination to her kind. It had been a symbolic token for independence.

Then Uredd had come along. He had seen past her hideous blue eyes into her sweet nature and intelligent mind. Together they had brought down the reign of the mountain king and set the demise of Skummel into motion. Hundreds of formerly enslaved trolls owed their freedom to Uredd and Gaven, but they had walked away, hand in hand, to find happiness among the humans with the dragon hatchling they called Stump hiding in the guise of a tortoise at their side. Eventually, they had found their way to Elvsmyr and Gaven gave birth to Leaf, her first-born daughter.

She had thought they had outrun her past, but Azool never forgave a debt. She had hunted Gaven down and demanded she relinquish Leaf. It takes a village to defeat a fairy swarm, and Elvsmyr had been leery of the blue-eyed trolless in their midst, but Gaven had found her voice. Under her direction, Uredd forged a silver shield that had withstood Azool’s deadly diamond spell and sent it zinging back to its caster, crystallizing the blue fairy in mid-flight, her fury forever blazing from her hideous face. Her swarm, had taken what they wanted: the hoard gathered by the dragon, now revealed as Troika before they had fled, never to return. The trolls had been victorious, but at a price. Granny Dammen was dead and Slug, his trollkin heart strong, had been imprisoned in a diamond.

Leaf wiped her tears and retreated to her favorite tree. She and the maple had grown up together. From high in the branches, she looked out on Elvsmyr and, in the distance, the peak of the human barn. The humans were close, but they had never been a problem. At least not as long as her father stayed away from the goats. He had undertaken several runs at the barn, but he had yet to capture even a drop of milk. It was sad. Uredd was the Slayer of Fairies, but he could not best a stubborn herd of goats.

A great blue heron stood motionless in the shallows of the river, but Leaf’s gaze, attuned to movement, darted to a kingfisher hovering over the water, hungry for a fishy meal. It was just another day until her thoughts whirled back to the eerie light. Perhaps it had been an illusion, a lingering glow from the strange door at the base of the tree. Fairies had no reason to come to Elvsmyr. Although the village was rich in supplies, they hoarded no gems. It wasn’t the troll way. The light meant nothing. Besides, it was far away, beyond the human farm, too far to be worried about on this warm autumn day. She jumped at the squawking of a mallard, its wings placed far back on the body and buzzing furiously as it flew low over the river. The heron barely moved, but the kingfisher plunged into the current, emerging with the glint of fish scales in his beak. Leaf shifted uneasily. She still missed Bay, the annoying puffin who had saved her from drowning the summer she had spent with the dragons. She sometimes still heard his constant chatter in the clattering of the leaves on windy days, but he was gone. Puffins are so very delicate. Not even Aurora’s healing honey could protect Bay from old age.

The rain had softened the lichen on the bark of the maple and it clung to her arm like a wet blanket. She reached back to wipe it away, and paused, her attention gathered by the colorful scrap of tapestry wrapped three times round her wrist. She never took it off, yet it seemed untouched by time and the muck of life along the river. Vibrant as the day the Elemental had given it to her, the ragged edge of tapestry was Leaf’s greatest treasure. The Heart’s magical loom had woven it from Aurora’s golden hair and a lump of raw crystal given as tribute by the dragons. It seemed impossible, but the loom wove tapestries that helped Aurora to see the world while casting the snow lights across the northern sky. Leaf had never told anyone what she had seen in the cave behind the waterfall. Aurora’s secrets were safe with her. Still, she longed to speak with her friend. Aurora would know what the door meant. Perhaps she had sent it, but it seemed unlikely. Aurora would send the snow lights not chisel an orange door through the base of a tree. She shoved the bracelet up her arm. Aurora had said it was their connection. Perhaps she should reach out, find her friend with her mind. Was the door an invitation? And if it was, who had sent it?

The sun slowly swung across the sky until it backlit the garnet leaves of the maple. The bracelet felt warm against her skin, unnaturally warm. Still soft as the day it was woven, it held no answers. This was Leaf’s puzzle. She would return to the door at sunset, and solve it.

While she waited for the blazing sun to relinquish the sky, she pondered her bond with the tree housing the door. She had accidentally on purpose kept the pit of the plum she had devoured at the Heart. At the time, she had thought nothing of it. The plum had been scrumptious, and so much had happened to distract her after that. The pit had snuggled deep in her cloak until the next autumn, when she found it shriveled at the bottom of her pocket. She had been curious, but she knew she should be careful. Planting a seed from the Heart could be dangerous, but she was so very curious. Careful to stay far from the village in case something went wrong, she had journeyed to the far side of the human farm where no troll dared to venture. She had found a column of sunlight large enough to nourish the tree and rich, black soil to give it the best possible chance. The rotting trunk of an elm sprawled across the forest floor nearby, its canopy missing from the sky, and giving hope to the scraggly seedlings below. It would be a race, but it was worth a try. No one had ever mistaken Leaf for a talented tender of plants, but she had clawed at the soil, loosening it to give the pit the best possible chance at survival. Cradled at the bottom of a hole, two handspans deep, the tree would live or die if the squirrels didn’t find it first.

She had turned away and left the plum pit to its fate until she had returned the next day to be certain it had remained buried. She had been only mildly surprised when instead of finding an unearthed pit, she had nearly passed by the sapling. In fact, she had overlooked it at first, but something about the color of the bark caught her attention. It was not the gray of a maple, nor the deep brown of a plum. It was russet and golden, spun from something entirely different from any other tree. Leaf had returned periodically throughout the winter to check on the sapling, but nothing had changed until the first blush of green returned to the valley. Tiny bristles had sprouted from the limbs and the trunk had doubled in girth seemingly overnight. It had survived, and it was growing, rapidly. By the end of its first summer, it towered into the sky. Nothing like a fruit tree, it sprouted spines and cones like an evergreen, but high at the crown, the deep magenta of a plum glowed in the sunlight. Leaf had known she must be there when it dropped. It was a gift from the Heart—one she would not share. The magical tree was her secret, and Leaf was very good at keeping secrets.

It was autumn again, and the plum would soon drop. She descended to the ground along the twisted vine pathway. The maple and vine were now one. It was as if they were meant to be together from the start. Leaf smiled as the breeze brought the perfume of the flowering meadow to her nostrils. Brown-eyed susans standing more than three times her height dipped and swirled all around her while tree frogs trilled their joy at dusk. She started down the path past the oaks of Elvsmyr now blazing in the sunset with her fingers gripping the bloodstone in her pocket.

Everyone thought the bloodstone was the source of her magic, but Leaf had learned the bloodstone was more talisman than tool. Even without it, she easily cast the spell of invisibility just by thinking about it. Still, she was never without it. The bloodstone was her connection to that horrible day when Slug had taken the diamond spell meant for her.

The frog song grew louder as the forest closed in around her. With the darkness wrapping her in a cool embrace, Leaf knew the humans would be home in their beds so there was little danger of interference. She had trod the path so many times she knew the footfalls as well as the freckles on the back of her hand, while ahead, the towering tree nearly obscured the half moon hiding in the boughs. Leaf decided to sprint the last bit, to feel the earth rushing beneath her bare feet. Her heart beating faster as she drew closer to the tree, she skidded to a halt at the sight of an old woman running her fingers over the strange bark.

Leaf dove off the path into the forest litter, raising a clatter she hoped sounded like chipmunks wrestling in the fallen leaves. The human didn’t seem to notice that she was no longer alone. Instead, she circled the tree, studying both root and trunk with her white hair falling past her waist in kinky waves that hinted at former entrapment in troll knots while her hands, thin with long fingers, probed the surface of the tree. Apparently unable to find what she sought, the human mumbled and drifted back toward the farm. When she was gone, Leaf scrambled to her tree and breathed a sigh of relief when she spied the magical plum still high in the branches, its shadow plump with juicy goodness. She laid her hand on the pulsating bark as the branch snapped behind her.

The human had returned, and this time she carried a lantern, flooding the forest in unnatural light. Leaf melted into the grass blanketing the forest floor. With the light casting ugly shadows across the old woman’s face, Leaf recognized the human her mother called Anna. She was nothing like the child Gaven had described. Her mother had kept a close watch on the human over the seasons, and this was most certainly Anna.

The woman set the lantern at the base of the tree and fell to her knees with her skirts swirling around her. She clawed at the ground, ripping tough weeds from the soil, and peeling the moss from the bark. Leaf swallowed the urge to charge the human, but she stood ready to pelt her with stones should she harm the tree. This was Aurora’s tree. Leaf would not suffer its abuse even though Anna, small and frail for a human, was huge in comparison to the undersized trolless. Finally, Anna sat back on her haunches as a crinkly smile began to appear. Once more, she reached out, gently this time, as she brushed a few sprigs of moss and a crisp, dry leaf away from the base of the tree. Her smile faded and she looked away as a tear formed and fell. She stayed transfixed in the gloom for several heartbeats before scrubbing the dampness from her cheek. Anna stood, her brittle bones rubbing and cracking as she leaned back into a stretch before she slowly returned from where she had come.

Leaf waited for the human to return, but the stench of goat had left the area. She spat a clump of rodent fur from her mouth and approached the tree carefully to avoid traps. Her heart stopped when she saw it. Scratched into the bark were strange markings. They did not look like any rune she had seen before, but it was clearly a message, one of great importance to Anna.

Chapter 4

The river ran fast, and throttled by debris from last night’s storm, it seemed angry. It was like that sometimes in autumn, a final clearing of limbs shattered during violent spring storms was needed to ready the land for a cozy blanket of snow and the tranquility that came with it. Humans moved about in the cold but they had never ventured far