I can’t explain why I think it’ll help,” I say apologetically. “Please just trust me because I need to focus on my other work.”
“Oh…okay.” Willow slowly begins to move, doing as I instruct. Meanwhile, I’m running through my plans. I search the laboratory for everything I might need to sacrifice to equilibrium to make the heartroot propagate faster.
My hands pause before the magic pours from them. If this works…I’ll be headed home before nightfall. I’m dizzy from excitement and apprehension.
Then, another thought crosses my mind. If this works, it will be the last time I see Eldas. My fingers tremble and I swallow hard.
The cycle must end, I remind myself firmly and get back to work.
Before I know it, I’m standing before the door to the throne room. Rinni has made herself scarce this past week. Maybe it’s because I’ve been locked away in my room. Or perhaps it’s because Eldas finally told her everything and I was right in thinking she’d take his side. Perhaps, when I’m gone, she and Eldas will try again at romance. The thought makes me ill and I focus instead on the heartroot in my hands.
“You’re late,” Eldas says curtly as I walk in. “I summoned you to sit on the throne an hour ago.”
“I know.” I meet his eyes and my chest squeezes further. Those icy eyes are the same that looked to me in the darkness with such longing…with what I had dared think might be love. “But it doesn’t matter. This is all about to end.”
The cycle.
Us.
“You figured it out,” he whispers, not even a corner of his mask slipping out of place.
“Yes, I’m leaving tonight.” I wait to see a flicker of emotion on his face. There’s a flash in his eyes, but one not even I can read. It could be just as easily relief as regret. And, because I don’t know, that’s how I’m certain I’m making the right decision. None of this will be clear to me until I’m back in a world I know, a place that makes sense, and I have some amount of freedom to sort through this mess of feelings trying to strangle me.
“Then I will grant you passage through the Fade,” he says slowly, “and hope that you never return.”
Chapter 36
It’s so late that only the very first haze of dawn has begun to kiss the sky.
Only Willow and Rinni have come to see me off. Eldas allowed me to depart into the night without so much as a goodbye. He dismissed me from that vast, lonely throne room with little more than a wish of good luck. No one else will see me off because this mission is still our great secret. If I succeed, Midscape will rejoice in a security it’s never known; it will no longer rely on a single person for the wellbeing of its lands. If I fail…Eldas will come to collect me before the coronation and no one will know his queen “tried to escape him.”
I am like a lump of coal, slowly being crushed underneath everything that surrounds me. Though I do not know if I’ll become a diamond…or dust.
Willow stares at me with bright red eyes, sniffling. “I thought… I had no idea you were leaving. Not like this… I would’ve… I would’ve…”
I pull him in for a tight embrace, one he returns without hesitation. “It’s all right. I’m sorry I kept it a secret from you. But I had to.” Willow was my one insistence to Eldas and Rinni about this departure—he would know where I went and he would be here. He’s been far too good to me for me to just leave without so much as a word to him. And he’d notice I was gone and raise an alarm otherwise. So keeping it a secret from him wasn’t an option any longer.
“It’s all right,” he says with a quivering voice. “I’m not mad, I—there’s so much more about Quinnar and Midscape I wanted to show you. I wanted you to be here for springtime rites, and then harvest festivals, and Yule.”
My heart breaks a little for everything I won’t get to see. But I still wonder if those fractures will be smoothed over the second I return to Capton. Will all of the longing and kinship I hold toward this magical world vanish when I’m no longer operating under the assumption that I must be here?
“I would’ve loved to see them with you. And, who knows, I just might. All