Free Bones of Faerie by Janni Lee Simner

Karin. With her braid pulled back from her smooth face she looked far too young to have fought in the War.
    “If you wish to tell me what you saw, I will listen,” Karin said. “Visions hold less power when put into words. But I won't make you speak. And you need not tell anything you don't want to.”
    Trees, fire, shadow—
I feared speaking would give my visions more power, not less. “I can leave,” I told Karin. “If the shadow is bound to me, I can draw it away.”
    “You'll go nowhere,” Karin said. “Not at my urging. Whatever threatens you, if we can have it out, we candeal with it. There's no magic so terrible it cannot be laid to rest.”
    The light rain stopped. Wind blew against my damp skin. “Ask Caleb. He saw everything. He was
there.”
    “I'm asking you. They're your visions. Only yours. Please trust me, Liza. Not for my sake, not for Caleb's, but for your own.”
    Father said strangers couldn't be trusted, that trust was a child's tale swept away by the War.
    “You called me,” Karin said. “When the trees attacked. You called, and I came. I don't know why, but put some trust in that, if in nothing else.”
    The moon slipped deeper into cloud, turning Karin's face to shadow—all but her eyes, which remained bright as she watched me. I took a deep breath, like when I dove beneath the surface of the river. “I saw my mother,” I said.
    Karin nodded, waiting. My voice grew low as the wind. “Mom told me she'd been a fool. She asked me to forgive her, for what I don't know. She told me—but she's dead. No one ventures out alone into the night and lives.”
    “You did,” Karin said.
    “I wasn't alone.” Without Matthew I would have drowned in the river or been devoured by the dogs. And Karin had saved us from the trees.
    “Perhaps your mother found help, too.”
    I shook my head. “She was alone.”
    Forgive me, Lizzy.
She was gone beyond anyone's forgiveness. Yet I heard myself ask, “Can visions be trusted?”
    “Trusted how?”
    “Are they real? Are they true? Can magic be trusted?”
    “Magic can never be trusted,” Karin said. “Just ask Jared, who burned his fingers more than once this evening as he learned to control his light. But as for whether you see truly—that I cannot say. Even Before visions were never simple. They're often tied up with other magic. What of the other children in your town? Do any of them have visions, and are those visions true?”
    “The others have no magic,” I told her, just as I'd told Samuel.
    I couldn't tell whether she believed me or not. She laced her fingers together, rested her chin on them, and asked, “Could you tell where your mother was in your visions? That might help.”
    Did I dare to hope?
Hope has no place after the War,
    Mom had said. Yet I so wanted to believe she lived. “She was in a place of—of ash and dead trees.” I should have found the memory of those blackened trunks comforting, but it only brought an acrid taste to the back of my throat. Crops wouldn't grow in so dead a place. People would die there, too. “What could kill so many trees?”
    “Pray you never have to know,” Karin said. “Tell me what else you saw.”
    I told her in bits and pieces, fragments that couldn't have made any sense. I told her what I'd seen, in this vision and in the others. A metal arch, bright as a mirror. A young woman and my mother, both stepping through the surface of that arch. Grasping trees whose shadows brought tall buildings down.
    Tallow trotted to my side, a feather dangling from her mouth. I petted the cat as I continued to talk.
    “Why Caleb?” I asked Karin. Caleb had been in my visions before. I dug my fingers into the damp dirt. Even the memory of how he'd invaded my thoughts made me want to crawl out of my skin.
    “Time and space are fluid in visions,” Karin said, but for a moment she looked very troubled indeed.
    I spoke on, telling how I'd reached through Caleb's mirror and felt the wind of a dead land