The fire made its own hot wind, blowing her hair back. Steam rose from her clothes, eliciting a fleeting smell of seaweed baking under a summer sun. The stench of smoke obliterated the odor within seconds. Her eyes watered and the back of her throat stung even before she stepped onto the path.
No particular glowing lines defined the path, but it remained unmistakable, a stripe of blackened ground in the midst of a fire that was consuming what looked to be at least an acre. Livy hesitated at its threshold. The path was less than three feet wide, but the flames did seem to be holding back from crossing into it. Her face, her only exposed skin, had already thawed from its damp chill and felt dried out, like she was looking into the open door of a hot oven.
She walked in.
Five steps in and her eyes were streaming from the smoke and heat. Ten steps and she had to tuck her chin down and cover her mouth and nose with her coat collar to keep from coughing. She kept going. The flames roared like a storm, gusting hot wind at her. She caught a whiff of burning hair, and realized the ends of her long ponytail were blowing out of bounds and getting singed off. Choking on a sob, she twisted up her hair and stuffed it down the back of her coat.
If she had stretched out an arm on either side, her fingers would have caught fire. Sparks and tiny airborne embers sometimes flew past, any one of which could set her aflame if it landed on her. Her tear-blurred vision seized upon each one that came near, keeping watch on it.
One of the sparks hovered, rose, stretched into a star-like white ball, and…smiled at her.
Fire fae.
“Hi,” she croaked in greeting, the word muffled in her collar.
It whistled in answer, a sound like a campfire igniting a vein of sap in a fresh log, but the sound did strike her as friendly somehow. As she continued staggering forward, the faery swirled around, staying just ahead of her, and soon three other sparks joined it. They danced in loops, like sparklers being waved by children.
A voice called out, a human cry slicing through the crackling roar of the fire. Livy looked to her left, startled. She gasped, stopped on the path, and kept staring even though her eyes streamed in the smoke.
“Skye?” she cried back.
For there stood Skye, maybe ten feet away, in a dark space between two burning trees, looking at Livy through the flames. Heat made her shimmer and ripple, but the pale face, the dark eyes, the hand lifting to catch Livy’s attention—it was undeniably her.
Skye called out again: “Hurry!”
It couldn’t be her. A fae illusion, a face in the fire, the way you could see if you stared into any burning hearth long enough, but enhanced with magic.
But she looked so real. Livy stood still, staring at her in agony. Skye was out here somewhere. What if she’d escaped the goblins and was trying to find her way back, and had been caught in the fire?
“Hurry,” Skye implored again.
What if by “hurry” she meant “save me”?
Livy sucked in a huge breath and dove off the path, running through flames as fast as she could, hoping with all her courage that the remaining dampness of her clothes would keep her alive for this requisite twenty seconds. Her feet crashed through the burning layer of underbrush and into the mushy moss beneath, but she kept moving until she reached the spot where Skye stood.
The image of Skye broke apart into ripples of smoke and rose into the air.
And Livy realized what a horrible mistake she’d made.
Already coughing and choking, half-blind with smoke-borne tears, she spun and raced back toward the path. Her boot plunged deeper into a patch of fallen twigs, and she tripped. She fell against a burning tree, shielding her face with both arms, but screamed when the fire found its insidious way between her clothes, or burned right through them. Searing pain lashed her forearms and ribs.
She yanked herself away from the trunk, landed on her back, and looked up for a second into the hellscape of orange and red flame curling high up into the canopy. Then she rolled frantically back and forth to put out the fires that had caught on her clothes.
The spark-shaped fae squealed and swirled in the edge of her vision. She guessed they were right over the path, so she rolled toward them, crashing through burning trees, choking, feeling new sizzling pains on her cheek, her legs, her sides.
She tumbled straight into the relative coolness of the path and landed on her back, weeping softly.
“Hurry.” This time it came from one of the squeaking sparks, bobbing around in her face.
Had they shown her Skye saying “Hurry” as a way to encourage her onward? Had they meant well? Or had it been mischief, meant to lure her off the path like a will o’ the wisp luring people into the swamp to drown?
No time to ask, and it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t leave the path again.
Though her burns still throbbed—the ones she could see were second-degree—she couldn’t do a thing to treat them right now. She certainly couldn’t go on lying here. So, she got up, and limped onward.
The bright white sparks looped along in front of her, keeping her company.
A minute later she glanced over her shoulder, and blinked in surprise. The forest fire was dying in her wake, though it still blazed ahead of her and around her. Fireweed shot up behind her, green leaf blades unfurling from stalks topped with magenta spikes of flowers. The blossoms bobbed at her like a curtsey, then the plants hopped off the path and vanished in miniature flashes of lightning.
She turned forward again. The heat and smoke and pain still threatened to overcome her, but trusting the path was her only option.
Her trust was rewarded with one more visitation: a scurrying shape on a tree trunk caught her eye, and she looked up to see a foot-long orange salamander clinging to the burning tree; the fire didn’t bother it at all. It unfolded a pair of leathery wings, leaped into the air, and soared away.
Livy watched it vanish into the shimmering heat waves. Did she just see a small dragon?, she wondered, astounded. Then again, why not? Faery creatures apparently came in no end of shapes.
One of the living sparks flew up beside her. “Quick. They have transformed your tribemates.”
Livy sucked in a breath in alarm, and immediately began coughing. “Okay,” she rasped out, and began running down the path.
Sweat dripped down her ribs under her clothes, stinging her burns. Everything on the outside of her clothes was seared dry. The fire continued to rage around her, though another swift glance back proved it was still dying out a few yards behind her. Spark-creatures and other orbs of light zipped about like fireflies.