the Prophet’s familiar greeting came, it pulled Eliana from a dream so vivid it followed her into waking.
Like trying to recall a word only just beyond her reach, a tightness bent in her chest, pulling her onward. Her fingers tingled. If she closed her eyes, she could hear a thin black rumble, as from a nearing storm. If she opened her eyes and unfocused them, ripples of gold danced at the edges of her vision.
I know where we’ll go tonight, she said, slipping from her bed.
The Prophet’s curiosity curled. Where?
I saw it in my dream.
Will you tell me?
Look for yourself.
You know I don’t like to do that, the Prophet said gently. Not if I don’t have to.
I’ll show you, then.
Tell me first. Please. I must know where we’re going. There was a pause. I don’t want to invade your mind, Eliana. I’m not like him.
I’ll tell you if you tell me what it is we’re working toward. What plans you have for me. Where you are, and if I can come to you.
The Prophet fell silent.
Eliana smiled grimly as she crept into the corridor, past Jessamyn’s frowning figure. For weeks, we’ve been working together. My mind is stronger than it’s ever been. We can talk without him noticing. You can hide me for, what, five hours now, as I move about the palace?
That’s true, the Prophet said, thoughts carefully blank.
Eliana turned a corner, hurried unseen past a patrolling pair of guards. You made me drop that knife for a reason, all those weeks ago. I think I deserve to know it. What is the purpose of this work we’ve been doing? Is it merely a diversion to pass the time?
Not a diversion.
Then what?
The silence continued.
Eliana darted like a shadow across the palace’s second floor, the strange memory of her dream guiding her through a maze of tiled rooms and curtained hallways until she emerged at last into a soft world of green.
It was a vast courtyard, as large as one of Corien’s grandest ballrooms. Walls heaped with flowers, vines spilling down iron trellises, bushes painted bright with berries. Rows of red blooms, oiled wooden tables of seedlings growing roots in glass vials. Enormous shivering ferns, glossy-leaved trees heavy with fruit. Eliana looked up at a ceiling of colored glass. Crimson and gold panes. Vents open to let in the nighttime air.
She cradled the nearest red flower in her hands, caught the familiar sweet scent from her rooms. So this is where he grows these flowers.
The Prophet felt tense and a little befuddled. Your dream showed you this?
Yes, this exactly. Every last detail. And…over here. It showed me this too.
She crawled beneath the seedling tables and disappeared into the courtyard’s thick green gloom. It was absurd, what she was doing, as if she were playing a child’s game. But a strange tension bloomed in her chest, tugging her on, and she had to follow it or she would burst. A strange vibration rattled her teeth, and she remembered forging her castings, plunging her hands into Remy’s wound. This felt the same—the same vitality, the same urgent thread of power growing taut and golden inside her bones.
I think it’s the empirium, she thought. I think it’s trying to show me something.
A slight ripple of alarm from the Prophet. Why do you say that?
Eliana pushed past a tangle of vines. She was deep in the courtyard now, a thick silence all around her. Moss soft under her hands and the air green in her lungs.
Then she saw it, the place from her dream—a tiny dark thicket formed of joined ferns and vines, bordered by the roots of a flowering tree with weeping branches and rough black bark. Hardly large enough for her to curl up in, and yet she pushed her way through the wild growth until she sat hunched in the middle of it, shivering.
“The air feels thin here,” she whispered, slowly moving her fingers through it. “Like I could push it aside and find something else behind it.”
The Prophet had grown very quiet. Would you like to try?
Yes, Eliana replied, trembling. Her castings warmed against her skin. But I don’t think I can.
Maybe something small, first. Something natural. Not a candlestick, but a tree. Can you coax its roots from the earth?
Eliana tried, her skin soon slick with sweat. The roots remained wedged in the black soil, but the air changed, vitalized with a humming hot charge. Eliana reached out with her power, guiding it to hold on to the feeling.