Chapter Fifty-Six
The king leads us to the bathing chambers, where the empty pool is still damp. He strides down the steps until he reaches the drain, then pulls it off. The plane shudders, almost roaring.
He looks up at us. “Are you coming?”
My friend steps forward. I grab her arm. “Wait, should we—”
“It’s here. Can’t you feel it?” She descends into the pool. My body pulses with energy, with fear, and I do not feel whatever magic she speaks of—only the roaring in my ears. It grows and grows until I realize it is the screams.
Lila and I reach Maxian in the center of the pool. He offers a hand to us both. I stare at his palm, uneasy. Lila reaches forward.
“We’re not going down there, are we?” I say, pointing to the drain. “We can’t fit.”
“Not like this, we can’t.”
Then the king snags my arm.
And we lace.
We lace down down down, wind ripping up my condensing body, a rush of light, an elongation of limbs, and we smack into something hard, something wet, something that pulls us under.
Water closes over my head, and my eyes fly open to a bleary vision, a shadow of land before me.
Then Maxian is kicking upward, dragging us with him, and I reach, stretch, ache for air.
We break the surface. Gasping, blinking, I cough, my body almost going limp with relief.
“Lila?” I call.
“I’m okay,” she gasps from the other side of the king.
We have emerged in a large lake, the clear blue sky above us.
“Almost there,” Maxian says, tugging toward the landmass at its center. An island.
We splash in that direction until my feet graze against bedrock. Maxian walks out of the water, up the bumpy bank, and onto the flat land above.
Lila and I drag ourselves onto the shore, tripping over the rocky sand. We collapse into the small bank that slopes upward. Ahead of us, Maxian strides to the very center of the flat island and throws out his arms.
“Welcome to the very heart of Versara,” he says. “Welcome to Lucan’s Tree.”
He truly has gone mad. Pushing myself onto my hands and knees, I survey the barren island that plateaus out of the water.
“Where?” I ask. “Where is the Tree?”
Maxian gestures. “We’re standing on it.”
Lucan’s Tree to the newer generation, the Tree of Life to the Unesse faeries—it doesn’t matter. It’s the same myth of existence. A Tree to explain to children why they are here, to comfort the old when they are leaving.
“Avery.” Lila stands up on the level surface. “Avery, get up here.”
With my last bit of strength, I heave myself over the rocky shelf and onto the soft, flat island center, roughly fifty feet in diameter.
I brush away some of the sand that coats the surface, revealing rings beneath.
Bands and bands and bands that meet in the center, several cracks running throughout.
Words and thoughts spiral away as emotions swamp my every sense.
“No,” I say. “No, this is not Lucan’s Tree.”
Maxian stands at its very center. “Did you think we’d build a palace around just any tree?”
Lila sways in horror. “You—you cut it down.”
He shrugs. “Well, not me personally, but my grandfather took the branches. My father used the trunk.”
“For what?”
“To build the throne.”
“It’s not Lucan’s Tree,” I repeat. “It can’t be. Lucan’s Tree is sacred.”
“Oh?” He quirks a brow. “I mean, I guess it would be more accurate to call it Lucan’s Stump.”
Lila shakes. “You—”
But I am already dropping to my knees again, palms pressing into the soft wood. I send my genius out. My moth flutters down my arms, through my hands. It is like hitting a nerve, a network of nerves, all severed, all screaming.
Screaming, screaming.
Alive.
My ears flood with a thousand shrieks, my brain pulsing with a million synapses of pain.
This can’t be. This cannot be.
“But…” Lila crouches beside me. “The wood isn’t rotted. It isn’t petrified, either.”
Only for the sickly, oily, parasitic magic that latches into its pith and will not let go.
Reign magic that keeps it alive, tortured, bent in a frozen state of submission.
I try to distinguish a singular voice, a nature that I can speak to, that I can beg for forgiveness and ask: What can I do? How can I help?
“It’s still alive,” I gasp.
“Did you know this?” Lila demands of the king.
Maxian crouches down before us, his thumb scraping across a dark bubble that forms on the surface. He brushes the liquid against his lips, closes his eyes, and breathes. When he opens his eyes, they glow golden.
“It is the only way to get the sap,” he says. “It’s why we let it live.”
“Let it live?” she cries.
But the voices keep screaming, screaming, and no matter how many times my moth signals, Let me help, let me help, there is no coherent reply.
“You call this living?” Lila cries. “You have mangled it, tortured it, used it. And still you keep it alive?”
He stands tall again. “Dead things don’t serve us.”
Pain and fury rip through me, singe my veins, like I am being sawed in half.
“This…” my friend gasps. “This is why it’s called the Pith, isn’t it? You…you severed the spine of our people! You destroyed the sacred for the convenient!”
Exhaling, I block out their conversation, to quiet the shrieking and the chaos and the thousands upon thousands of cleaved lives.
What is your story? I ask calmly, gently.
Finally, the voices respond, all at once, a thundering cry.
The same as yours.
My genius sinks into the Tree’s, and it is all so much, a grasping and gasping and pushing of roots through rock and brick, spreading out from this mighty hill—no, it is the core of the hill itself.
A system so ancient and deep, other plants have grown from the soil that collected in its divots, our tunnels like the trails of worms and—
A face so familiar, I cannot breathe, but this time, it is rounder, younger, brighter. A brunette faerie gripping the roots, groaning in the dark, in the quiet of a tunnel. Blood and water and wailing.
The shrieking of a babe expelled into this world, caught, held against her chest. The infant does not latch, will not, the mother sinking to the ground, blood streaking across brick.
Please, the faerie begs. Please, or they will hear us.
The child screams louder and a piece of us breaks off, willingly, an offering.
The mother gapes down at the little root in her hand, palm sticky with sap, and gives it to the baby to suck.
As the baby does, mouth gummy and happy, her skin glows brighter, irises flickering from brown to gold to brown again.
A feed before the rings. It is miraculous. It is a crime.
It is my mother, Olive. Olive, with her lilting voice and calm, calloused hands, her prayers to plants, and her lost, torn-up heart. Olive, young and hardy and life-giving.
And it is me, in her arms.
It is me, with a strange and strong genius.
It is me, with a magical marker unlike any other.
It is me, with power fueled by roots under the state gardens.
It is me, with a thousand voices saying Hello again.
It is me, with the trees trapped in doors.
It is me, with shifting, sap-colored eyes.
It is me, with screams in my ears, begging for aid.
It is me, with the power to help.
My eyes fly open, chest heaving. Maxian and Lila still debate. I reach for my golden moth ring and slip it off. In the very center of the stump, among the cracks and rings and sand, is a little crevasse, the smallest opening. And through it grows a singular green stem.
A sprout of hope.
I reach forward, fingers brushing the little creature.
Let me protect you, I plead. Let me—
“Great find, Avery,” Maxian says, and then his boot slams down on the stem, crushing both it and my fingers.
The Tree shrieks in protest, a terrible howling—
“No matter how many times we weed it, it just keeps growing back.”
He presses down harder, and I grunt, force my lips closed to not give him that satisfaction.
“Wait!” Lila drops to her knees, trying to pry his boot off my hand. “My king—”
“If you two are such good friends, maybe you should match.”
He crunches down harder, and my nails begin to splinter. I cry out. Lila rips at his boot, but it’s to no avail, his eyes glowing, magic roiling.
“Stop this, please,” she says. “I understand.”
“Do you? For even Lucan’s Tree bends to my will. If you will not submit, I will make you.”
“I do!”
His heel crunches the bones in my hand; I scream.
“Please—”
“Please, what?”
“Please, stop,” Lila pleads.
“What will you do to make me stop?”
We both glance up at him. He will make her beg for it.
He will make her give, as I have given, and she will do it willingly, even if just to make my pain stop.
I cannot have that. Lila has the protection of House Illusion and House Healing now.
She is a free faerie, all of her debts paid for, and she has friends.
“I vowed to you last night,” I say. My friend sucks in a breath. “You have no need of her.”
“Who are you to make demands of me?” The boot presses deeper into my fingers, the bones threatening to break. I catch his golden gaze with mine.
“The mother of monarchs.”
Lila gasps, looking at me. “What are you saying?”
My free hand covers hers, prying it away from his boot.
“I love you, too,” I whisper. “Not even in death will a king come between us.”
“Avery?”
I shove the moth ring onto her finger. I think of safe harbor, of silver hair. I stretch my genius as far as it will go. I think of where I would’ve brought Lila if I had the power to do so in the library. I pray that Kassandra feels her coming.
Lila’s mouth drops open. “Wait—”
Then she disappears, lacing into the plane.
The king roars, and I close my eyes, praying she will land safely.