Page 58 of The Salt-Black Tree
Eventually the tempest passed. Baba stroked Nat’s back, patted her shoulder. Her humming became words as the Drozdova quieted.
“It was never here, little one.” Winter spoke softly, with none of her usual brisk displeasure. Very few would hear this tone from her, and rarely more than once. “She kept it under her own ribs; must’ve been uncomfortable. She planned to have you bring the arcana to the Tree and trade yourself, and I was supposed to take the damned bauble and let it happen.”
A last, terrible, almost-painless shudder passed down Nat’s entire body. “You knew.”
“Maybe I did. Or maybe I’m just not shocked.” Baba’s sigh was heavy, and all the weariness in the world filled its sinuous length. “Not much surprises me anymore, at least.”
“I didn’t want to die.” The tree was supposed to remove the shame, but Nat stillfeltit. Why?
“Of course not. You haven’t even lived yet—though that’s no insurance. Worse happens all the time, somewhere in the world.” Clearly finished with any coddling, Baba loosened her arms. She held Nat at a distance, examining her granddaughter, and even being buck-naked on a gritty cinder-warm shore under a creepy-ass black tree, scrutinized by that dark, ruthless gaze, didn’t seem half as daunting as it would have before Christmas.
Nowtherewas a question. “What day is it?”
“According to the mortals here? January first,S’ Novym Godom.” Baba nodded sharply, let go of Nat, and turned on her heel. She was back in her business suit and heels; stringy muscle moved under the flour-dry skin of her calves as she strode to the Tree. It rustled menacingly, but she paid no attention, merely bending to snatch the dry snakeskin cloaking its roots. In her hands it shrank, thickened, turned opaque; by the time she stalked back to Nat it was a fall of shimmering pale-green cloth with golden edges.
She cast it over Nat’s bare shoulders and clicked her tongue, an impatient noise Coco in her atelier would have found familiar. Nat obediently lifted her arms.
The dress swarmed over her, soft material draping, hugging her curves and seamlessly sealing. Long sleeves brushed the backs of her hands; the hem hovered above Nat’s ankles and the waist came to a deep point in the front. It looked like Baba’s party dress, but without the fraying.
“Call it a present.” Baba stepped back, rubbing her dry palmstogether briskly. A ruddy gleam flashed; the steely twigs holding her mass of gray hair twitched as strands sought to escape.
Then she opened her hands, and cupped in them…
Looks like a bloody diamond,Nurse Candy had said, and she was right. The gem glimmered, pulsing softly with its own inner rhythm; though it burned with white brilliance the light turned rubescent at its edges. Faint tinges of blue showed too, veins returning to their source; its glow spread in questing tendrils.
It was beautiful, but it was also trapped. A thorn-nest of blackened iron branches curled around the gem, and it cringed mutely from the sharp points just as any casual brush from outside would draw blood.
“I’ll teach you how to carry it.” Yet again and for once, Baba de Winter’s tone held no razor edge. “That’s the last gift. After that, you have to go and learn.”
“Okay.” But Nat looked away from the thing she’d crossed the continent twice to find.I’m barefoot in the swamp.“How thehellam I getting home?”
She hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but inside the Tree there was no difference between thought and speech and she hadn’t quite readjusted. She looked back to catch the very last of a rueful smile disappearing from Winter’s thin, corpse-livid lips.
“You have a car, Natchenka,” Baba said, and lifted the bright-gleaming gem in its thorny setting. “Now listen closely; I’m only going to say this once.”
WINTER NEVER LASTS
The green hills of Spring’s Country now held no furious black spiderweb, no diamond lightning in the distance, no dozing sense of dread and threat. Still, Nat took mortal roads most of the way.
It was how the journey had started, after all.
There was an entrance to Elysium in Atlanta, but Nat passed through like a ghost on the artery of I-85, wending steadily northward. Charlotte grew on the horizon, approached at a steady lope, swallowed a blue car built from curves very like a ’68 Mustang’s, and finally receded like a wave on a shore—lake or ocean, it didn’t matter. At Petersburg, with the sun falling just past its winter-day apex, Baby swung briefly off the freeway, pausing to idle in a space outside a 7-Eleven.
The mortal clerk—Harry Chastain, fifty, heavy, balding, engrossed in a car magazine—didn’t even glance up when a barefoot woman in a long pale-green dress shading into gold at sleeves and hem stepped through the sliding glass doors, the electronicsomeone’s herebeep as familiar as his own breathing.
He did, however, shiver a minute later as the sound repeated while Nat stood in the chips aisle and looked at rows of bright packaging. An edge of sudden chill far deeper than even Baba’s displeasure touched her skirt and the backs of her hands, ruffling her mass of unbound curls.
The Cold Lady looked just the same—a teased black manetoo dark for nature or dye, her generous mouth as corpse-livid as Baba’s unpainted smile, the same black tank top and skinny, cord-muscled greenish shoulders. Her silver belt buckle gleamed under sickly fluorescents.
She was barefoot, too.
Linoleum was pleasantly chilly against Nat’s soles. She could have opened Marisol’s suitcases and found some footwear, but it seemed unimportant when you’d been vomited out of a salt-black tree. Sealed, renewed, reborn, and a complete, total failure at the one thing you’d set out to do.
Even if you’d been set up to fail—by your own damn mother, too—it stung.
“Here for me?” She stared at the corn chips. So many different flavors. Was there a god of snacks? Maybe she’d find out someday. “Or him?” She glanced past the Cold Lady; the clerk was still engrossed in his magazine, his head bowed and the bald spot on the crown glowing.
“Just passing through.” The Cold Lady examined the shelf of offerings too, tapping an unpainted finger against her pallid cheek. “Thought I’d grab a Yoo-hoo. I love that stuff.”
