Chapter Text
The Fall.
The pod came down in the dark.
It tore through the sky over the Irish midlands like a thrown coal, trailing sparks and a long, ragged banner of smoke, and plowed a furrow a hundred yards long through the bog at the edge of a wood that nobody had set foot in for thirty years. The sound of it carried for miles. A shepherd on a distant hill crossed himself. A fox, deep in the heather, put its ears flat and ran.
Then it was quiet, and the peat hissed, and a small metal hatch opened with a long, groaning sigh.
A girl climbed out.
She was ten years old. She had gold hair, tangled and singed at the ends, and a thin gray traveling suit with a symbol on the chest that no human being had ever seen. Her eyes were very blue, and very wide, and very frightened. She stood on the lip of the broken pod with her bare feet in the cold black mud, and looked up.
There were stars. Too many of them, and in all the wrong places. Not one of them was home.
She did not cry. She had cried for the whole of the long dark, in a voice nobody could hear, until there was no water left in her. She only stood, very still, and breathed in the strange, wet, green-smelling air, and tried to understand where she was.
A light bobbed through the trees.
Then another. And a voice, low and rough, shouting something in a language she did not know.
She turned her head.
There were three of them.
They came out of the wood in a ragged line, with lanterns held high, and long dark things in their hands. They were men, tall and broad and bearded, in heavy wool coats and caps. They stopped at the edge of the bog, and stared at the great smoking scar in the earth, and at the small pale girl standing on the twisted metal.
One of them said a word.
It was not a kind word. She understood that much. It had the sound of a door slamming.
She took a step toward them, one small, tentative step, and held up her empty hands.
Please, she said, in the soft, round, liquid syllables of her own language. Please, I'm lost. I don't know where I am.
The man in front brought up the long dark thing.
It made a sound like the end of the world.
Something struck her in the shoulder, and she felt it go clang, hot and hard and strange, and fall away into the mud. She stared down at it. It was a small, round, flattened lump of lead. It had not even scratched her skin.
She looked up.
The man's face had gone white. His mouth was open. He said a word, over and over, high and cracked, and then the other two began to say it too, and one of them dropped his lantern and ran.
Taibhse, they were shouting. Taibhse. Taibhse!
She did not know what it meant.
She only knew that a sound had come from her own throat, a high, thin, terrified cry, and that her feet had left the ground. She had not meant to. She did not know she could. But she was floating, a foot above the bog, with her hair rising around her face and her small fists clenched, and the three men were screaming and stumbling backward through the heather.
They ran until they hit the trees, and then they kept running.
The light of their lanterns shrank, and flickered, and was gone.
Kara hung there in the dark, shaking, with the sound of her own breathing loud in her ears.
They think I'm a ghost, she thought, though she did not have the word. They think I'm something to be afraid of.
She came slowly down to the mud.
She sat with her knees against her chest and the cold seeping through her thin suit, and she looked at the stars, and she was very, very much alone.
-----
The Wood.
It was called Coill an Taibhse by the people of the village, though they did not say it often, and never after dark.
The Ghost Wood.
It had been a place of some importance once, long ago, a hunting ground for a family that had since died out, or left, or been forgotten. The houses had fallen in. The paths had grown over. The fences had rusted away to red dust. But the trees had stayed, and the water, and the soft, deep, green hush of a place that nobody came to, and it made a very good home for a lost girl.
Kara learned the wood the way a creature learns anything: slowly, painfully, and with a great deal of hunger.
She learned which berries were sweet and which made her sick. She learned that the red mushrooms were to be left alone. She learned to catch fish in the cold brown river with her bare hands, quick as a heartbeat, and to light a fire by rubbing two pieces of dry wood together until her palms were sore. She learned the strange, intimate trick of the sun, that when it came out in the afternoon and lay warm across her shoulders, she felt stronger, and lighter, and a little more like herself.
She learned that she could break a branch in her fist.
She learned that she could leap a ravine.
She learned that she could lift the great gray boulder at the mouth of a small hill, and hold it above her head, and set it down again without a sound, and that behind it was a cave. A dry, deep, quiet cave, with a low, curving roof and a floor of pale sand. She cleared it out. She lined it with moss and dry grass. She dragged in the thin wreckage of her pod, the scraps of silver metal and the dull, humming crystal at its heart, and arranged them against the wall like a little shrine.
It was not a home.
But it was somewhere to sleep.
She was not entirely alone for long.
There was a fox, first, a thin, wary, orange creature with a torn ear, who came to the mouth of the cave one winter night and stood in the snow, shivering. Kara gave it half of a fish. The next night it came back. By spring, it was sleeping against her stomach.
There was a family of hedgehogs, who nested in the roots of an oak near the river. There was an old gray owl who sat on a branch above the cave and watched her with great round yellow eyes and made small, disapproving noises whenever she stayed up too late. There was a hare with a limp, and a badger with a bad temper, and a great, shaggy, silent hound who had been abandoned by some hunter long ago and now followed her through the trees like a loyal gray shadow.
She helped them.
She could not have said why. It was simply what her hands did. She pulled thorns out of paws. She set a broken wing with two twigs and a strip of cloth. She dug a drowning lamb out of a mud bank and carried it back across the river on her shoulders. The animals did not understand her, and she did not understand them, but they seemed to understand each other, and the wood slowly grew warmer.
She was never entirely lonely.
But on the long, dark nights, when the owl hooted and the fox shifted in its sleep, she lay with her eyes open, looking at the hole in the cave roof where a few cold stars shone through, and thought, there must be somebody.
Somebody who could say something back.
Somebody who could say her name.
-----
The Deer.
She heard it before she saw it.
It was a bright, clear spring morning, and she had gone down to the river to catch her breakfast. The sun was warm. The new leaves shone gold and green. A mist lifted from the water in thin white ribbons. She was crouched on a flat stone, up to her elbows in the stream, when a sound came through the trees that made her whole body go still.
It was a cry.
A thin, high, broken cry. The sound of an animal in terrible pain.
She was out of the water in an instant.
She ran, barefoot, through the bracken, over fallen logs and slick stones, with her wet hair streaming behind her. The sound grew louder. It came from a clearing a quarter mile upstream, an old grassy hollow where the trees stood in a ring, and as she burst through the last screen of hazel, she stopped.
A young deer lay on the grass.
It was a little doe, with a pale coat and enormous dark eyes, and one of its back legs was caught in the jaws of an enormous rusted trap. The iron teeth had closed around the bone. Blood stained the grass. The deer was screaming, and thrashing, and every movement made the trap bite deeper.
And kneeling beside it, with both small hands wrapped around the trap's jagged arms, trying with all her strength to pry it open, was a girl.
She was about nine years old.
She had black hair, long and straight and tied back with a ribbon that had come half undone. She wore a green wool coat that was too big for her and a pair of scuffed brown boots. Her face was pale with effort, and streaked with dirt, and wet with tears. But her jaw was set, and her hands did not stop.
When she looked up and saw Kara, her eyes went wide.
They were green.
Kara had never seen a color like it.
They were not the dull green of moss, or the sharp green of new grass. They were deep. They were clear, and bright, and full of light, like the heart of a stone held up to the sun. She had seen a thing like it once, in a vein of crystal deep inside the cave. She had never forgotten it.
Kara stood in the middle of the clearing, with her heart pounding and her mouth open, and could not make herself move.
The girl was staring at her.
She had gone white. Her hands had stopped. Her whole body had gone rigid, like a rabbit's, and she was looking at the pale, wild, barefoot girl with the tangled hair as if she had seen exactly the thing she had been warned about, her whole life, in the village.
The ghost, thought Kara, with a sudden, awful certainty. She thinks I'm the ghost.
The doe shrieked.
The girl flinched, and looked back at it, and her face crumpled. A tear ran down her cheek. She turned back to the trap and wrenched at it again, with a small, furious, desperate sob.
She was terrified.
And she was not running away.
Something in Kara's chest turned over.
She took a step forward. Slowly. Carefully. She held out one hand, palm down, in the way she had learned to approach a frightened animal, and stepped close to the deer.
The girl made a small sound. She did not move.
Kara crouched beside the doe.
She put her right hand flat on its neck. The creature was trembling, and slick with sweat, and its heart was hammering against her palm like a bird in a cage. She closed her eyes, and let her own calm run down her arm into it. It was not a thing she knew how to explain. It was just a quiet stillness she had learned in the wood, a patient, steady kind of warmth.
The doe's thrashing slowed.
Its great dark eyes rolled, and softened.
It lay still.
Then Kara looked at the girl, and with her left hand, she pointed at the trap.
Now, she said, with a nod. Open it.
The girl stared at her.
Kara pointed again. She made a small, tugging motion, pulling apart.
For a long moment, nothing happened.
Then, with a shaky breath, the girl bent over the trap, and wrapped both her small hands around the iron arms, and pulled.
Kara did not help. She did not need to. She had put one hand lightly on the spring, and quietly, without a single sound, she held the heavy iron mechanism steady, so that it gave under the girl's grip as though it were made of wax.
The jaws opened.
The doe jerked free.
It staggered to its feet, wobbling, favoring the injured leg, and for a moment it stood between the two girls, looking from one to the other with huge, wet, grateful eyes. Then it turned, and bounded away into the trees, a pale ghost of a thing, and was gone.
The clearing was very quiet.
The girl sat in the grass where she had fallen, with the broken trap beside her, staring at her own hands. They were red and raw. They were shaking. She looked up, very slowly, at the strange blonde girl in the gray suit, who was kneeling a few feet away, watching her.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
Then the girl in the green coat laughed.
It was a small, startled, breathless sound, half sob and half giggle. It bubbled up out of her like water from a spring. She put her hands over her mouth, and her shoulders shook, and she said something, a quick, bright, tumbling string of words, in a voice with a little lilt in it like a song.
Kara did not understand a single one.
But she understood the sound. It was warm. It was happy. It was the very first friendly thing that anyone on this whole strange, cold planet had said to her.
She smiled.
It was a small, shy, crooked smile. It felt strange on her face, as if the muscles had forgotten how.
The girl went on talking. She pointed to herself, thumping her palm against the front of her coat, and said, slowly and clearly, one word.
"Lena."
Kara blinked.
"Lena," said the girl again, tapping her chest. She said it a third time, with exaggerated patience, the way you might speak to a very small child. "Lena. Lena. Lena."
"Le-na," said Kara.
It was strange in her mouth. Round and soft and a little bit bright, like a coin dropped into water. She said it again, tasting it. "Lena."
The girl's whole face lit up.
It was like watching the sun come out. She clapped her hands. She said something that sounded like yes, and pointed at Kara, with her eyebrows raised, and made a small, questioning gesture, a tilt of the head, an open palm.
And you?
Kara pressed a hand to her own chest.
"Kara," she said.
She had not said it aloud in so long. It cracked in her throat, a little rusty, a little hoarse. She cleared it, and tried again.
"Kara."
"Kara," said Lena, carefully, and her eyes were shining. "Kara."
It was the best sound Kara had ever heard.
She said it in a thousand different ways, in the days afterward, a thousand different voices, but this was the first, and it would always be the one she remembered: a small, serious, clear little voice in an Irish accent, in a clearing full of morning light, saying her name as if it were something precious.
-----
The Edge of the Wood.
They met every day after that.
They met at the edge of the trees, where the wood gave way to the long green fields that sloped down toward the village. There was a flat, mossy stone there, shaped like a bench, with a crooked old hawthorn leaning over it, and by the end of the first week, both of them thought of it as theirs.
They did not understand each other.
That was the great difficulty. Lena spoke English, with a soft Irish lilt, quickly and constantly and with a great deal of expression. Kara spoke a language that had died with her world. They had a handful of words between them: Lena. Kara. Deer. Tree. A few more every day. Water. Bread. Yes. No. Look. They used their hands, and their faces, and a great deal of pointing. They drew in the dirt with sticks. They acted things out, with wild gestures and exaggerated expressions, until one of them guessed it, and they both collapsed laughing.
It was slow, and clumsy, and maddening.
And it was the most wonderful thing in the world.
Lena always came with her pockets full.
She brought a different thing each day. A jam tart, still warm from the oven, with the filling spilling out the sides. A slab of soda bread with butter and honey. A paper bag of sticky buns, a bar of dark chocolate, a handful of boiled sweets in colored wrappers that crackled and shone like little jewels. She laid each one out on the flat stone, with enormous ceremony, and watched with wide eyes as Kara tasted it.
Kara had never had a sweet.
The first time she bit into a jam tart, she went completely still, and her eyes went wide, and she said something in Kryptonian that was almost certainly a prayer.
Lena laughed so hard she fell off the rock.
Kara brought things, too.
She brought fruit, wild strawberries from the sunny bank by the river, a basket of blackberries, a fat red apple from a half-wild tree deep in the wood. She brought flowers, bluebells and primroses and, once, an entire armful of foxgloves that Lena had to explain, with elaborate gestures, were poisonous. She brought a baby hedgehog, curled up in her cupped hands, and laid it carefully in Lena's lap.
And she brought stones.
They were shiny. They were bright. She had found them in the cave, when she was digging out the back wall, deep in the rock where the dark veins ran: glittering lumps of crystal, flecked with color, some clear as water, some deep as wine. She did not know what they were. She knew only that they were beautiful, and that when she held them up to the light, they threw little rainbows on the walls.
She gave Lena her first one on the fifth day.
It was a small, round, clear stone, no bigger than a grape. Lena turned it over in her fingers, and stared, and gasped. She held it up to the sun. The light went through it and broke into seven colors that danced across her face.
She said a word, very softly, that Kara did not know.
She put the stone carefully into the pocket of her coat, and patted it, twice, and looked at Kara with a face so full of wonder that Kara felt her own heart do something strange and warm and entirely new.
It was in the second month that Kara found the emerald.
She had been digging, as she always did, in the back of the cave, in a narrow crack she had not explored before. She had been going slowly. It was dark and close, and the rock was cold against her cheek. Her fingers brushed something smooth. She pulled, and a chunk of gray stone came loose, and behind it, glinting in the faint light from the entrance, was a green.
She stopped breathing.
It was a crystal. It was the size of her fist, rough and uncut, set in the rock like an eye. And it was green. Deep, clear, shimmering green, the exact green she had seen on a morning in a clearing, in a pair of wet, furious, determined eyes.
Lena.
She worked it free, very carefully, with her fingers, and a little bit of strength. It came out of the stone with a soft, sharp crack. She held it up. The faint light came through it, and the whole cave turned to green water.
It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
She did not sleep that night. She sat in the mouth of the cave with the crystal cradled in her lap, watching the sky go from black to gray to pink. She had to show it to her. She needed to show it to her. It did not matter that they could not talk. She could not stand it if Lena did not see it.
At the first light of morning, she ran.
She waited at the stone for two hours.
When Lena finally came, Kara was practically vibrating. She held out the emerald in both hands, and Lena stopped dead at the edge of the trees. She put a hand over her mouth. She took one step. Then another. She knelt, and looked at the stone, and then, slowly, at Kara.
She said something quiet.
Kara did not understand the words. But she saw Lena touch her own cheek, and her eyelid, very lightly, and then point at the stone.
It's the color of my eyes.
"Yes," said Kara, in English, the first English word she had ever been sure of. "Yes. Lena. Yes."
Lena laughed, and wiped her eyes, and hugged her.
It was the first time anyone had hugged her in a very long time. Kara stood perfectly stiff for a moment, startled. Then, slowly, carefully, so as not to hurt her, she put her arms around the smaller girl's shoulders and held on.
----
The Rings.
It was the end of that summer when Lena came with a box.
It was a very small box, of dark blue velvet, a little worn at the corners. She carried it in both hands, with her chin up and her cheeks pink, in the manner of someone about to do something extremely brave. She set it on the stone between them, and sat very straight, and waited.
Kara looked at it.
Lena made a small, encouraging gesture. Open it.
Kara lifted the lid.
Inside, on a bed of white satin, lay two rings.
They were simple things. Plain silver bands, thin and bright. Each of them held a small stone, set in a tiny claw. One was blue, a pale, clear, summer-sky blue, exactly the shade of Kara's eyes. The other was green, deep and bright and clear as water in a forest pool.
Emerald, thought Kara. It's an emerald.
She picked up the green one, with a hand that was not quite steady, and turned it over. Inside the band, stamped in tiny, careful letters, were three marks.
L + K
She stared at them.
Lena had been watching her face. She began to talk, very fast, in the tumbling, eager, breathless way she had when she was nervous. She mimed things with her hands. She pointed to the stones, and the jewelry, and the village, and held up her fingers. She tapped a little tin on the stone, a tin Kara had seen before, where Lena kept the shiny stones she'd been given. She held up the tin, and shook it, and mimed handing it across a counter.
It took some time to work it out.
But slowly, piece by piece, the story came clear. Lena had taken the shiny stones to a shop in the village. She had traded them for papers, the strange flat green papers that people used for everything. And she had taken the papers to a second shop, and traded them for a pair of rings.
She had spent every stone Kara had given her.
She had spent all of them on this.
Kara looked at the rings.
She looked at Lena, who was sitting very still, with her hands clasped in her lap and her eyes lowered, waiting, with the stiff, anxious look of a girl who had suddenly realized that she might have made a terrible mistake.
"Lena," said Kara, in a voice that wobbled.
Lena looked up.
Kara put the green ring on her own finger.
It was much too big. It hung loose, and slid right off. She caught it before it hit the stone, and held it in her palm, blinking hard, as her eyes began to sting.
Lena giggled.
She picked up the blue one, and tried it on herself. It was too big, too. It slid straight down to her knuckle. She held up her hand, and the ring dangled, and they both looked at it.
Then Lena began, very slowly, to laugh, and Kara began to laugh, and the two of them laughed until they were gasping, leaning on each other, on a mossy stone at the edge of the wood.
When they were done, Lena took a long piece of thread from her pocket.
It was soft, brown wool. She cut it in two with her teeth, and strung the green ring on the one end, and the blue on the other, and tied each one in a neat, tight knot. She put the green one around Kara's neck, very carefully, and the blue one around her own.
The ring settled against Kara's collarbone, small and warm and unbelievably light.
She touched it with one finger.
Lena touched hers, too.
They looked at each other.
It was a very quiet, very simple, entirely wordless moment. Neither of them said anything. Neither of them needed to. But as they sat there, under the crooked hawthorn, with the late summer sun lying gold on the grass and the whole green world humming around them, Kara knew, with a sudden, certain, enormous clarity, that she was no longer alone.
----
The Last Day.
It happened in October.
She waited at the stone.
It was a gray, cold morning, with a thin rain falling. The leaves had turned to copper and gold. She sat under the hawthorn with the emerald in her pocket and a basket of apples at her feet, watching the long green slope that ran down to the village, with her hands tucked into her sleeves.
Lena was late.
That was not unusual. Sometimes she was kept at home, with chores or lessons. Kara waited an hour. She waited two. She ate an apple. She counted the crows on the fence.
By noon, the rain had stopped.
By evening, the sky had cleared.
The sun went down, red and gold and slow, over the fields, and the stars came out, one by one, and still nobody came.
Kara sat on the stone for a long time, with her hand around the little ring on its thread.
Tomorrow, she told herself. She'll come tomorrow.
She waited the next day.
And the next.
And the day after that.
Lena never came back.