Chapter Sixteen
I hauled Amber deeper into the trees with one hand locked around her arm, the two of us crashing through undergrowth that seemed determined to slow us down at every step.
Roots caught at my boots. Branches whipped back into my face, one catching me hard enough across the cheek that I felt the sting of it a full second after it happened.
Behind us the sounds of Orias's fight faded into the general roar of blood in my ears, and every instinct in my body screamed at me to turn around and go back for him.
I didn't. He'd told me to run. Getting Amber clear of the worst of it mattered more than my own gut telling me otherwise, and I trusted my brother to hold his own — I'd watched him do it a hundred times before, watched him take on worse odds than this and walk away from it, and doubting that now wouldn't do either of us any good.
"How much further?" Amber gasped, stumbling over a root I hadn't managed to steer her around in time.
"I don't know." I caught her before she went down completely, hauling her back upright without slowing our pace. "The whispers are still pulling. We follow them until they stop."
The forest thickened the deeper we went, trunks pressing closer together, the canopy overhead knotting into something that blocked out what little evening light had been filtering through before.
My chest burned. My legs burned worse. The ground kept shifting underfoot, wet leaves and loose soil making every stride a gamble, and somewhere off to our left I heard something crash through the undergrowth that I chose not to look toward, because looking would have meant slowing down, and slowing down wasn't an option right now.
The pull ahead of us sharpened with every stride. Less like sound now. More like gravity, something enormous and old dragging us toward a specific point in the dark, patient in a way that scared me more than the shadow-things chasing us had.
"Rowan." Amber's voice cracked on my name, breathless, scared in a way she hadn't let herself sound since we'd crossed the treeline. "Is he going to be okay? Orias?"
"He's fought worse than that." I said it with more certainty than I actually felt, mostly because she needed to hear it and partly because I needed to believe it myself. "He'll catch up."
"You don't know that."
"No," I admitted. "I don't. But I know my brother, and I know he'd rather die out here than let one of those things get anywhere near you. So he's not going to let that happen. He's going to catch up."
She didn't ask again, though I felt her hand tighten in mine, some silent, private fear she was choosing to carry rather than voice a second time.
We kept moving, both of us breathing hard, both of us listening past our own footsteps for any sign of him behind us and hearing nothing but our own panic reflected back at us in the dark.
We broke into a small clearing a few minutes later, and every hair on my arms stood on end the second we crossed into it.
The tree.
It stood exactly like it had in the dream I'd never fully admitted to having, massive and ancient, bark twisted into shapes that looked almost deliberate if you stared at them too long — knots and grooves that could have been faces, could have been letters in some language none of us had ever learned, could have just been bark doing what old bark did.
The whispers didn't come from the wind here.
They came from the tree itself, low and constant, a hum that settled into my chest like something reclaiming territory it had always considered its own.
"That's it," Amber breathed, staring up at it, her grip on my hand going tight enough to ache. "That's the tree. From my dreams."
"Mine too."
She turned to look at me, surprised, and I realized I'd never actually told her that — that the same tree had been haunting my sleep for weeks before I'd ever set foot back in this town, long before I'd known she was dreaming about it too.
There hadn't been a right moment to bring it up.
There still wasn't, not really, standing here with the thing looming over both of us, but keeping it to myself any longer felt pointless now.
A crash through the undergrowth behind us spun us both around, my hand already gathering wind on instinct before I registered who it was.
Orias staggered into the clearing with one arm pressed hard against his ribs, blood soaked dark through his shirt from collarbone to hip, face pale in a way that made my stomach drop straight through the ground.
"You're hit." I closed the distance fast, catching him as his knees buckled slightly on the uneven ground, his weight heavier against my shoulder than he'd ever willingly admit to.
"I'm fine." He wasn't. His voice came out thinner than usual, forced steady through obvious effort, each word costing him more than it should have. "Took a few hits covering you both. Nothing that won't heal eventually."
"You're bleeding through your shirt, Orias. That's not nothing."
"Amber can play nurse." He winked, staring at her until she laughed. "I'm really fine. I can heal."
He straightened, waving off the hand I had braced against his shoulder, though the effort it cost him to do it didn't escape either of us, and his jaw tightened around a wince he tried and failed to hide.
His eyes went to the tree, and whatever pain he was pushing down got shoved further under the surface, replaced by the same recognition that had already hit both of us. "That's the one. From the dream."
"You've had it too? The same tree?" Amber asked, glancing between the three of us like she was only now realizing how much all of this had apparently been converging on us separately for weeks without any of us saying a word about it.
"Apparently we're all having the same nightmare lately." Orias's attempt at a grin came out strained around the edges, more grimace than smile. "Family bonding, I suppose. Shame none of us thought to mention it sooner."
"We were a little busy," I said. "With everything else."
"Fair point."
I didn't have much patience left for jokes with him still bleeding in front of me, ribs clearly worse than he was letting on, but I let it go, because pushing him on it here wasn't going to help anyone and he'd only dig his heels in harder if I tried.
Amber's hand found mine again without either of us discussing it, and together we stepped toward the tree, the whispers rising to fill the whole clearing the moment we closed the last of the distance between us and the trunk.
"Do you feel that?" she whispered, her voice unsteady.
"Yeah." My eyes stayed fixed on the bark, on the way it seemed to shift subtly at the edges of my vision even when nothing was actually moving when I looked straight at it. "Feels like it's been waiting."
Together we reached out. My hand tightened around hers as our fingers brushed the rough bark at the same moment, and the second we made contact the whispers cut off entirely, the whole clearing dropping into a silence so total I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears.
Then the tree moved.
The bark groaned, splitting slow down its center, peeling back like a door held shut for longer than any of us had been alive.
Behind it sat a passage leading down into the earth, air drifting out cool but not cold, carrying the scent of damp soil and fallen leaves, and underneath that, faint but unmistakable, the smell of autumn itself — spice and woodsmoke and something achingly familiar I couldn't quite place.
Amber glanced at me, wonder and fear tangled together on her face in equal measure. I squeezed her hand and managed something close to a smile.
"We've come this far," I said. "Walking into a magic tree isn't any less insane than the rest of tonight's already been."
She huffed something that might have been a laugh under better circumstances, and together we stepped through the opening, Orias falling in close behind us, one hand still pressed hard to his ribs, breathing shallow enough that I made a mental note to check on him properly the second we got a spare minute.
The stairs wound down narrow and steep, cut from something that felt more like packed earth than proper stone, worn smooth in the center like generations of feet had walked this exact path before us.
The dark down here sat differently than it had above ground.
Calmer. The kind of quiet that came from a space that had been sealed off a long time, undisturbed, holding whatever secrets it had been built to hold.
When we reached the bottom, the space opened up into something none of us were remotely prepared for.
A room. Warm, lived-in, lined floor to ceiling with books whose spines had gone soft and worn with age, the kind of collection that took decades to build rather than money to buy all at once.
A fireplace sat cold and unlit against the far wall, though the whole room smelled faintly of woodsmoke anyway, mixed with cinnamon and something sweeter underneath that reminded me, uncomfortably, of Halloway's Hearth on a slow morning.
A scattering of mismatched couches and low wooden tables filled the rest of the space, rugs layered haphazardly across the floor, everything arranged like whoever lived here had cared more about comfort than any kind of matching set.
"What is this place?" Amber asked, turning in a slow circle, disbelief written across every line of her face. "It looks like someone's living room. Underground. Inside a tree."
I didn't have an answer for her. Orias didn't either, judging by the silence beside me, both of us too busy trying to reconcile a cozy reading nook with the six shadow-things that had nearly killed us above ground twenty minutes earlier.
Before either of us could offer even a guess, a voice cut through the quiet. Coming from somewhere further into the room, past where the low light hadn't quite reached yet.
"Amber?" It said, as we all froze.