shouting orders, the clamor of the battalions splitting to their positions drowning out the ethereal peace, their bone armor thundering over the stone ruins as they take their places.
“Prince!” Lysulli shouts, standing in front of a swathe of waiting archers. “Can I trust your terrible human eyesight to oversee the ambush placement?”
They motion to the archers and Malachite bristles, but Lucien starts.
“Yes! One moment!” He throws a smile at me. “I’ll be back.”
“Far too soon,” I tease. He gives me a last squeeze of my hand, then jogs over to the archers. I watch them clamber nimbly together over the debris of the ruins for a moment and then disappear up a cliff face.
“We should position ourselves near the First Root,” Yorl advises, wading through the ruins as the matronic trudges behind him, displacing rocks and rubble with its huge bulk. “So that when Varia approaches within terminal range, we can act.”
“Lucien can act, you mean,” Malachite says.
“Same thing.” I wave his grumpy arse off and turn to the celeon. “Lead the way, Master Polymath.”
“Not a master yet,” Yorl corrects. “An adjutant.”
I laugh and step around a boulder. “You mistake me for someone who gives a shit about any titles ever, darling.”
“I thought you’re engaged.” Fione sniffs. “Shouldn’t you be calling fewer people ‘darling’ now?”
Dead silence. The matronic hisses a little. Malachite makes a sputtering noise behind me.
Oops.
“E-Engaged? SINCE WHEN?”
“Keep your voice down!” Yorl hisses at Mal. “Lest you start a rockslide!”
“Being buried under a rockslide would be preferable to listening to him chew me out for the next seventeen months,” I lilt.
“Months?” Malachite chokes out. “Try YEARS! Decades! I can’t believe you two are so thickheaded! Who gets married in a time like this? Who even proposes? What do you even eat at a stupid upworlder’s wedding?” He pauses his rant and looks at me with the tiniest of plaintive gazes. “Why didn’t you tell me first?”
“It was literally a half ago, Mal.” I pat his shoulder sympathetically. “Fione just noticed because she’s observant about jewelry.”
Malachite glances down at the blue rose on my finger, and his eyes widen. “Oh.”
“Hurry up,” Yorl insists. “We’re almost there.”
He points one claw into the distance, to the very middle of the ruin. We follow a decorative line in the ground, glazed reddish tile long buried in dust and fragmented by time. The smell of flowers is everywhere—so faint it’s more of a suggestion than a true scent. Half vanilla, half cinnamon—it’s a smell I’ve never smelled before. It changes moment to moment, wildly swinging between sharp rosemary, to musty lavender, back to vanilla and everything in between.
“Are those the flowers, you think?” I ask Yorl. He’s covering his nose.
“Hopefully not,” he says, muffled by his handkerchief. “They reek.”
“I don’t think they’re so bad,” I muse, watching as the ghostly golden blooms bob like a sea lapping at our waists.
“You’re a Heartless. Of course you think the smell of rotting meat isn’t so bad,” he grunts.
I blink once. Twice.
“They smell like rotting meat to you?” I ask.
Yorl’s green eyes over his handkerchief freeze on mine. Fione catches up to us then, and chimes in, “Definitely rotting meat.”
All three of us look at Malachite, who, though still wrapped in his own thorny disgruntlement, blurts words. “Yup. Bad meat.”
Yorl glances at the flowers, then warily back to me. “Let us continue, regardless.”
I sniff hard and wait for unpleasant, but while the scent cycles, it never changes from utterly delightful. Could it be…the Tree of Souls? It feels like this scent is welcoming me, and only me. I look up as we walk, the shimmering branches suspended high above and the not-quite-there trunk so massive it seems to hold up the entire world. It connects everyone; I saw it. I don’t know how, or why, or what it really is, but it isn’t just magic. And it isn’t just a Tree. It’s more than that.
A god.
No, not a god. Because a god can’t be split, or hurt, or wounded by mortals. But it’s the closest thing to one I’ve ever known, ever felt, ever dreamed of. It gives magic to the entire world, visiting each witch in their dreams when they’re ready for it. It’s the same one that Lucien saw in his dream before becoming a witch. Nightsinger, Varia, the High Witches—all of them. They got their magic from this wounded Tree. Such powerful magic, from a wounded thing.
Such a powerful, torn soul.
“Are you the one who sent me those dreams?” I ask the branches