Chapter 19
Nineteen
“What do you want me to do?” I asked, feeling exhausted. “I have the basics of forest magic, but I can’t say I understand it.”
“You don’t need to understand it. You just need to follow my directions,” Riini snapped. But it wasn’t really her; it was the eons of knowledge that had once been inside a living elder tree, speaking through the voice of a child.
“I do need to understand. I have learned three forms of magic already, and none of them were ones I could do without practice.” I felt frustration building, feeling the fire of rage licking up my throat. “You must teach me more than this basic understanding.”
“No.” Riini shook her small head. “We don’t have time for full knowledge.”
“Then I refuse.” I could feel the twist of anger in my stomach. “Find your own way to regrow your tree. I will burn the entire forest down to find Spider if I must.”
That was the danger of the fire dragon’s magic. It was too likely to eat up whatever common sense I had. Rage was easy, and when it cleansed, it did so completely. There was nothing left, just as the fire dragon had killed everyone left in the mountain, no matter their guilt.
“You won’t find her if you burn the forest. You think an animalia who survived this long would reveal herself to you?
You think you can threaten her?” Riini leaned forward, her eyes a brilliant green.
“The only way for you to find Spider is to do this. She sees the web of fate. Do you honestly think you can outsmart her?”
I glanced at Na?. The words were an echo of a question she had asked me before we had taken on Centipede. Did I think I was as clever as Fox, trickster of the animalia?
“I think I have done more than enough to prove what I am capable of.” I clenched my jaw, fisting my hand before opening it and revealing a wolf made of ice that threw back its head in a silent howl. “I must learn before I do magic.”
“There isn’t time. Forest magic is meant to be learned by the elves, who have hundreds of years to master it. You have hours. Give me your power and that will be enough.” Riini barely glanced at the wolf, her gaze fixed on me. “It will not hurt, and you will not remember it when it is gone.”
“When what is gone?” I asked, suddenly wary. I closed my hand around the wolf, and it turned to water, dripping between my fingers.
“Close your eyes,” Riini said.
“Why?” I asked.
“So that we might find out what you can afford to sacrifice to save Tavornai and the elves in it.” Riini’s voice was tired.
She pressed a hand to her temple, rubbing the skin there.
“Please. This child grows weak; she has so much less to offer. If she attempts the task one more time on her own, there is a chance that she will not recover.”
I let my gaze linger on Riini. Despite her vitality, I could see the sharpness of her clavicles, nearly pushing through her thin skin.
I closed my eyes, forcing back the anger of fire magic. I heard Riini shift forward, taking one of my hands between two of hers. I expected to feel the pull of forest magic like the tug on my body when I dove into the cold ocean, or the pull on my scalp when someone redid my braids.
Instead, I opened my eyes and realized I was in a vast, empty room. There were statues around me, but I couldn’t quite make out what they were.
“I’ve been here before,” I said.
“Yes, you have,” Riini said, only it wasn’t her. It was a warped tree that was the same size as her, with soft green leaves for hair and arms and legs made of branches twisted together. “Not with me. Do you remember?”
I shook my head, the memory falling away.
It was hard to read an expression on that face made of carved wood, but I thought Riini looked drawn. She turned, pulling at a golden thread, similar to the one I had seen wrapped around Hallu when Na? and I had saved him from Centipede.
Riini shook her head, the leaves shivering. She dropped the golden thread and picked up another. This one was blue, and she rubbed it between her fingers.
As she did so, I felt something rise in me. A memory. Yor?mu handed me a blade. It was silver and made from Krustavian ore.
She crouched in front of me, because I was too small to meet her eyes. “Airón, do you understand why I am training you?”
“I understand. I need to kill the emperor or he will destroy the Northern Kingdom.” I turned the hilt of the blade between my fingers. “Do you think I can do it?”
Yor?mu closed her hand around mine, stilling the trembles that had taken over my body. “Yes.”
I blinked, coming back to myself. Riini was watching me, her hand still on the blue thread.
“Will you sacrifice this one?” Her voice was strange, wooden.
“Sacrifice that memory?” I asked sharply. “I thought you charged in life? In years?”
“No. Not always. There are other sacrifices that hold more value.” Riini tugged on the thread, and it no longer felt harmless when she pulled.
“I will not give up any of my memories for this task.” I kept my jaw from clenching, trying to keep my breathing still.
“Then she will.” Riini tapped her chest, the sound hollow. “Only she has so few left to give. Only the things she has clung tightly to. It makes them all the more valuable.”
The tree that looked like Riini opened its trunk, and I could see a handful of threads. They glowed brightly, and some were nearly as thick as my finger. I touched one and saw a memory—a young Sagam, Joxii holding a younger Riini.
Two adults were dancing in the middle of the room, laughing.
The children stared on, until the father drew Sagam into the dance and then dragged Joxii, the mother plucking Riini from her arms and the whole family circled the room, their feet beating a rhythm even when there was no tune to drive the dance.
I gasped. “Is this all that’s left?”
“Yes.” Riini pulled at the edges of her open chest, drawing it closed around the last threads of memory that she had kept.
I thought of the memory with Yor?mu. It was not the first time she had said something similar. It was not even the time I valued the most. I had so many memories, enough that I could sacrifice one so Riini could keep hers.
“Take it.” I looked away as Riini grabbed hold of the blue thread, yanking it out.
She knelt on the ground, the cave we were in suddenly becoming the flat surface of the tree stump that had once been an elder tree. Riini cracked off one of her toes, and in her hand I could see it was the root from an elder tree.
She placed it on the ground, then wound the blue thread of my memory around it. She covered both with one hand, the other on top.
For a second nothing happened, then the thread and the root began to glow, pulsing with my heartbeat. From between her fingers, a small shoot of green emerged.
Riini gasped in happiness. But I could tell it was going to fade, the same way I knew a moment before the magic of my ice melted.
I rushed forward, placing my hands on top of hers, watching as the green shoot grew between my fingers, the trunk widening.
It spread our hands apart, and just when it looked as though it was going to stay alive, I saw the tips of the green leaves turn brown, gold racing through the veins, dark sap beginning to leak out of the trunk.
Riini’s face fell, her eyes turning down as moisture collected in the corners of her eyes. “It needs more and this body has no more to give.”
“How much more?” I asked.
She shook her head and I closed my eyes, seeing the threads there just as clearly as I had when they were between her fingers.
I plucked a blue one out, a memory of my father on one of the first days of winter, his cheeks red from the cold, his braids perfectly plaited.
He stood before my mother, pledging his allegiance to her as he did every winter.
I tore it from where it was rooted, twisting it around the trunk of the tree and knotting it tightly. The tree flared with life, the leaves regaining their color, the branches growing upward.
Reaching through my memories again, I searched for another blue thread. I found one: eating warm maple buns with my sister while we hid from our mother’s sixth wife who was supposed to be watching us to make sure we didn’t get into the treats before dinner.
I tore it out, wrapping it around the tree’s roots. I ran my fingers over it, the blue thread pulsing with life, and yet I couldn’t remember what had been in that thread. Had it been important? Had it been something I would miss knowing?
The tree touched the ceiling of the room and burst through, letting in rainbow lights that drifted down to the ground. Riini was gasping, crying in earnest. She placed both hands on the tree trunk, her wooden palms matching the bark.
No, they didn’t match. The tree was consuming her, reeling her in. With a frown, I reached out, pulling on her shoulder.
“Riini?” I asked.
She turned to me, but her face froze, losing its life. I tried tearing her loose, but she had already become one with the tree.
I lost my grip on her and stumbled back, barely keeping my feet. I blinked, and suddenly we were back in the greenhouse.
The tree had shattered the pot it had been planted in, its roots growing over the table and down into the stump of the burned elder tree beneath it. It had grown so tall that it had shattered the glass of the greenhouse, and the shards lay around us along with Riini’s body.
I dropped to my knees next to her, shaking her shoulder. Lady Chaliko had backed up, her hands covering her mouth, her eyes wide as she pressed her back against the wall of the greenhouse, her gaze fixed on the tree that was continuing to grow.
The roots pushed up around us, and I scooped Riini’s tiny body in my arms, grabbing hold of Na? by the back of the neck as though she was a kitten. I stumbled over the roots, finally reaching Lady Chaliko.
“We need to get out of here!”