It is where the Spirit of the Wood will speak to you.
Ravyn knelt—tugged on Jespyr’s arm.
The alder tree’s roots jutted over her, caging her to the ground. She stays with us. If she does not feed us with her rot, we will feed her with our magic.
Ravyn’s voice trembled with loathing. “That is why people flock here when the Spirit snares them in the mist? To feed you?”
The dark alder extended a branch. To feed. And to fuel. What we consume, we pour back into the mist. What you call an infection, we declare a gift. The branch traced Ravyn’s brow. I would think you, of all people, would understand that.
Ravyn recoiled. “My magic is not a gift. It’s hardly anything at all.”
The tree pulled back. And while it had no eyes, I was certain it had turned its glare to the Nightmare. Seems you have much to learn yet. Now go. The Spirit will not wait forever.
Ravyn looked between the trees at that pale shore. Roots no longer held him place, but his legs did not move.
Forward, always forward, the pale alder mocked. Isn’t that your creed, Ravyn Yew?
A frown drew across Ravyn’s brows. He looked down at his sister, then back at the Nightmare—at me. “I’m not going anywhere without them.”
Then your journey was for naught.
The Nightmare hissed. His thoughts swaddled me in darkness. Five hundred years became nothing, Jespyr shifting to a visage of Ayris, lying unmoving between the twin alders.
And I understood, better than I ever had, how he had become a monster.
His life had been a never-ending barter. He had given his time, his focus, his love, for magic. He’d wielded it with great authority. But it was magic that had taken his kingdom, his family, his body, his soul.
It was balance, but it was not fair. And now he was full of agony, whittled down to something jagged—a tooth, a claw.
I know what you’re thinking, I told him.
Do you?
It’s the same thing you’ve thought for centuries, isn’t it? That none of this would have happened if you had simply played in the wood with Ayris as a child and never asked the Spirit for her blessings. You’d have never gotten the sword. Never bled onto the stone. You might have held your children as dearly as you did your Cards.
I softened my voice. For if you had, there would have never been any Cards at all. And none of this would have happened.
He laughed, a bitter sound. And now you know that every terrible thing that happened in Blunder took place long before I handed Brutus Rowan a Scythe. It happened because, five hundred years ago, a boy wore a crown—had every abundance in the world—but always asked for MORE.
Ahead, the alder trees stirred. They shifted toward each other. The doorway between them to the pale shore—to the Twin Alders Card—was beginning to close.
Ravyn’s voice was taut. “Please. I will speak to the Spirit, meet any price.” He grasped Jespyr’s arm, trying to pry her from her cage of roots. “But not my sister.”
The trees didn’t heed him, the gap between them closing farther still.
There’s a reason you are here a second time, I said to the Nightmare, my voice urgent. You may have lost a sister to magic, but you must not resign Ravyn to the same fate. You are the Shepherd King—the author of everything I have ever known. You wrote Blunder’s history, Aemmory Percyval Taxus. Now rewrite it.
The alders were closing, the pale shore disappearing, our one shot at the Twin Alders Card—disappearing.
Ravyn wrenched at roots with bloody hands. But he couldn’t get Jespyr out. He turned to the Nightmare. Shouted a broken plea. “Help me.”
Our shared vision snapped forward. And though I had no control over my body, I’d swear it was me that tightened the Nightmare’s grip on his sword.
He drew his blade over his hand, cut a thin slice in his palm, and stalked toward the twin alders. When he slapped a bloody handprint onto the pale alder, the hill did not merely shudder. It quaked.
The trees spoke as one, their voices a dissonant, wretched harmony. Taxus.
The Nightmare fixed the alders in his gaze—addressed them with a malice so ancient it coated my mind in brimstone. “There are many circles that draw through time,” he said. “Many mirrored events, many woods that inevitably lead us to the same place. Much of what happened five hundred years ago has happened again.” His eyes narrowed. “But not this. You will not make a monster out of him as you did me, forcing him to give up a sister. Let go of Jespyr Yew. Or I will cleave your roots from this earth.”
The alders went rigid, their slithering roots and twisting branches halting to an eerie stillness. Then, so abruptly I’d no time to scream, they seized Ravyn, ripping him away from Jespyr. He shouted, thrashed, but was tossed with abandon through the doorway onto the pale shore. The trees turned their vicious branches on the Nightmare.
But his sword found them first.
He took to the roots, cutting Jespyr free with furious precision. The hill trembled, the opening between the alders as narrow as my bedroom door at Spindle House.
Keep going, I urged him.
He pried Jespyr’s limp body off the earth and slung her over his shoulders. The two of them were struck over and over by flailing branches. Ravyn reached out, the space between the alders now so narrow he could not get back out. “Take my hand!”
The Nightmare took it. When Ravyn yanked him forward, the doorway between the twin alders slammed shut. The trees and the hilltop were gone. All that remained now was a pale shore, accompanied by the sound of waves.
And the oppressive smell of salt.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Elm
By the third tap of the pink Card, the flawless—unearthly and unreachable—Ione Hawthorn was gone. The real Ione was there in her stead.
Freckles. The first things Elm saw were her freckles. They were concentrated along the bridge of her nose, then sparse over her cheeks and brow and chin, a final few resting in the bowl of her cupid’s bow. There was a vertical crease in the center of her bottom lip—lines in the corners of her mouth and eyes.
Smile lines, he remembered. This Ione smiles.
There was textured skin, some of it irritated, around her nose. Half-moon shadows beneath her eyes. Eyelashes were partially blond again, and the small gap between her two front teeth had returned. The hair along her brow didn’t fall with such unnatural elegance as before. There were tangles—rogue curls. Disarray and imperfection. She looked so…human, like the girl he’d seen riding through the woods.
There were not enough pages in all the books Elm had read, in all the libraries he’d wandered, in all the notebooks he’d scrawled, that could measure—denote or describe—just how beautiful she was.
“There you are.”
The frost and indifference in Ione’s hazel eyes had vanished, vibrant colors of earth and fire and forest entirely unrestrained.
A small, fractured noise came out of her. She moved toward him but didn’t make it two steps before her knees buckled, and then Elm was catching her, holding her as they sank onto the floor.
Body shaking, eyes screwed shut, Ione opened her mouth against his chest. Her scream was silent at first, then so loud it filled Elm’s ears. Tears fell down her face and her breaths came in labored gasps, her lungs begging for air, denied again and again by her unending wail.