Faerie Winter Read Online Free

lay on a drop cloth beside the couch, and she took up a handful of it. “Go get that wood, if you’re so eager to escape your lessons.” She grabbed the metal-toothed hand carders from the table and began pulling wool through them.
    I watched her fingers grow shiny with sheep oil, fighting the fear that had stalked me ever since I’d found Mom and brought her out of Faerie, fear that Caleb hadn’t fully healed her after all.
    “I’m
fine
, Liza.” Mom didn’t look up as she continued carding the wool.
    I wanted to believe that, but Mom had lied to me before. How was I to know when to trust her? I stalkedpast her and out the door before I could ask the question aloud.
    The clouds were thicker now. I buttoned my coat and pulled on hat and gloves as I walked through the town and down a side path to the Store where we kept our firewood. I could barely make out the words
General Mercantile
above the door. The rest of the sign, proclaiming that the Store sold ice, fudge, and cigarettes, had long since faded away.
    The door creaked as I opened it, stepping into a dim room piled high with stacked firewood. Gathering wood had been easier with the trees asleep. Behind the Store’s metal counter, I heard whispers.
    I found Kyle there, lying on his stomach, talking to a row of black ants with a metallic blue-green sheen. Carpenter ants. Though they made no sound, I knew that the ants spoke to Kyle, too. Kyle was an animal speaker and, at five years old, the youngest surviving child in our town to have come into his magic.
    Anyone who could talk to carpenter ants knew they didn’t belong in a woodshed. Kyle looked up at me, as furtive as if he’d been caught dipping a finger into the honey. He had a streak of dirt across his nose, and a slick of black hair stuck straight up from his head. “They say the wood is warm. They say they want to stay.”
    “They can’t stay,” I told Kyle. His coat and rumpled pants looked like they’d been slept in. Perhaps they had—at the meeting during which we’d told the townsfolk about our magic, Kyle’s mother, Brianna, had wanted to force Kyle and his older brother out of the house, only their father wouldn’t allow it. It was their father who’d shivered to death holding his first wife’s shadow too close less than a month later. As far as I could tell, Kyle’s mother could barely stand to look at her children now.
    A half dozen ants climbed onto Kyle’s fingers, which were losing their baby thickness. If the ants feasted on our firewood—or the Stores’ timbers—we’d have a problem. “If they stay, we’ll have to lay down poison.”
    “It’s not their fault!” Kyle hunched protectively over the small creatures. “It’s cold outside.”
    It wasn’t a hawk’s fault it had to eat, either, but that didn’t mean I was obligated to let one gut me for its dinner. “There are other warm places. Tell them to find one.” Ants, like termites, had the entire sleeping forest to feast on this winter.
    Kyle stroked the ant crawling over his thumb, as if it were some tame creature, as if its colony couldn’t bring the Store down around our ears.
    “They’re
ants
, Kyle.”
    The boy stuck out his lower lip. “Don’t be mean.”
    Could Kyle talk to deer and rabbits, too? How would he hunt when he got older? One way or another, he’d have to learn to care less for the animals he talked with. “The ants will be fine. They’re good marchers.”
    Kyle’s face scrunched up, as if he was thinking about that. He cupped his hands, whispered words too low to hear, and set his hands down on the floor.
    The ants on his fingers crawled to the ground and began marching toward the door. Other ants followed, from the floor around Kyle, their insect legs moving in perfect unison. More ants emerged from the woodpiles—so many. Kyle hummed an old work song from Before under his breath.
The ants go marching one by one …
    I smiled at that. “Where’d you send them?”
    Kyle flashed