He was gone, she thought. Gone.
Grief wrapped itself around her as she sat up, flinging off the sheets, and—
There he was.
Holland stood at the window of her chamber. It was the first time she had dreamed of him in daylight, and he looked different. The sun caught the white of his hair, and the silver of his cloak and pin, light tracing his edges even as it poured through his body, as if he were a curtain.
“There you are,” she said, relief overcoming the strange sensation of waking from one dream into another. “I have been looking everywhere.”
Holland glanced over his shoulder. “I am right here.” He turned his attention back to the window. “Come and see.”
She rose, surprised by how cold the stone floor felt on her bare feet, her senses keen even though she was still dreaming. She joined Holland at the window, felt the almost weight of his hand as it came to rest on her shoulder, the other gesturing out and down to the courtyard below. The leaves were changing on the trees, the red and gold so bright it looked like they were burning.
A moment later the door flew open behind them, and Kosika turned, Holland’s touch falling away as Nasi barreled in. There was a sweet bun in her mouth, another on a plate.
“Oh good, you’re up,” she said.
Kosika realized, with some surprise, that she was indeed awake.
Nasi flopped down on the nearest chair. “What are you doing at the window?”
She looked back, sure that she would find the room behind her empty. But Holland was still there, one hand resting on the sill.
Not a dream.
“I have never been a dream,” he said evenly, and Kosika expected Nasi to startle at the sound of his voice, but the other girl didn’t seem to notice, sprawling across the sheets in the presence of the Summer Saint.
“She cannot see me.”
His voice rang so clearly, not in Kosika’s mind but through the room itself. As if he were standing there. As if—
“Again you doubt me,” said Holland, his voice taking on a darker note.
Kosika pressed her palms against her eyes. It was one thing to see someone in your dreams, in the in-between, the shadow realm of sleep, and quite another to see them standing in the living world, especially when no one else could. She was afraid then, of what he was, and wasn’t, afraid that she wasn’t blessed, but mad.
“What’s wrong?” asked Nasi. A moment later Kosika felt cool fingers brush her forehead, and looked up into her friend’s scarred face. She wanted to tell her—but what would she say? That she was seeing phantoms? That her dreams were following her out of sleep?
Holland stepped behind Nasi, his eyes dark, impatient.
“Is your faith in me so fragile? That it bows and breaks under the slightest breeze?”
“No,” said Kosika, quickly, only to realize she’d spoken aloud. Nasi was staring at her, confused. “I don’t feel well,” she said. “Could you fetch some tea?”
Nasi searched her face another moment, then kissed her temple, and said of course. The moment she was gone, Kosika turned to face the king.
“Why can’t she see you?”
“Because I did not choose Nasi,” he said. “I chose you.” Those words, like a hand smoothing rumpled sheets. Followed too quickly by the disappointment on his face. “Tell me, Kosika, did I choose wrong?”
“No,” she said, her voice tinged with desperation.
She wanted him to be real. She wanted to believe. And as if he knew her mind, Holland stepped closer.
“Hold out your hands,” he said, and she did, cupping them before her. To her surprise, he held out his own, and brought them to rest around hers, and she could almost feel them, like a breeze brushing her knuckles, grazing her skin.
“I chose you in the Silver Wood,” he said, and as he spoke, she felt a sudden flush of heat, a warmth that kindled at her very core, spreading through her chest and down her arms to the place where Holland’s fingers swallowed hers.
“I chose you,” he said, “to be my hands.”
Something began to happen in the room around them. Crumbs of dirt rose from the floor, where they had lodged between stones, and beads of moisture squeezed themselves out of the air, and warmth dragged itself from the sunlight in the window and all these fragments gathered in the space between her palms, and began to grow. Out of everything, and out of nothing, a seed, a sprout, a sapling that threw roots down between her fingers—and his fingers—and reached its narrow limbs to the ceiling and sky as it grew in the space between their bodies. It was a silver tree, its bark tender and pale.