Tugging her wrists free of the loosened rope, she thought of the words carved into Pa’s copper tithing bowl.
The steepest sacrifices make the strongest tithes.
Knowing what she must do pierced her with sorrow. But if it would save her mother, and Grace, and all her friends … if it would save the woods and undo the harm her father had caused … she would do it.
Tilting her chin, Emeline fisted her hands and summoned all her courage. Glancing past the stunned Vile—who any minute now might recover and strike her down—Emeline looked to the forest’s heart.
“I’m here to give a tithe,” she told the Heartwood. “I give you my voice—and with it, my dreams beyond the woods. I’ll be your new Song Mage, if you’ll have me.”
Breathing in sharply, Emeline thought of the cost. She would never again sing her songs beneath the lights. Never walk out on a new stage or record an album she was proud of. She would never get the chance to prove she could make it on her terms.
Emeline breathed out, letting it go.
It hurt when the woods took her offering. Like hands reaching in and plucking out her soul, severing her from her oldest dream.
But when she breathed, something new flooded in.
It felt like the night she sang to the elm tree cage, asking the trees to set Hawthorne free. She’d felt the power in her voice flow out of her that night. This time, though, it was the reverse. Power was flowingin.Infusing her marrow and blood. Folding itself into her skin.
It was like Grace said: there was magic in sacrifice. Emeline had tithed the most precious thing she owned, and something equally precious was filling in the gaps.
It coursed through her—thick as honey, bright as starlight.Pulsing like a blazing-hot sun. Humming like a swarm of contented bees.
Power.
It tasted like sugared sunshine on her tongue.
She laughed at the impossibility of it. And there, standing in the glow, bursting with magic, she started to sing—with both sorrowandhope in her heart.
All of her old songs, the ones she’d kept locked away, were set free, flowing easily out of her. With them, power surged. The force swelled in her throat, far stronger than before. It brimmed in the air, heavy and thick with promise.
When the first song ended, she sang another, then another. She didn’t grow tired and weak. Emeline found herself an endless font of power. She poured it out: here, in the heart of the forest, for the roots of the trees to soak up.
As her voice filled the cavern, the trees took what she gave them, healing themselves from the bottom up. They joined in her song, passing her magic on to the next, and the next, moving all the way to the edge of the woods.
Driving out the curse.
But it wasn’t just the woods she healed.
“Emeline …?”
Her mother’s voice was no longer a rasp, but a soft, quivering thing.
Emeline looked to find the Vile glimmering like a mirage. The air shone, delicate as a cobweb, thenchanged.
Like a butterfly abandoning its chrysalis, the Vile fell away, until a monster stood before Emeline no longer. In the monster’s place was a middle-aged woman, beautiful as the moon. Her raven-dark hair fell in waves around her shoulders, her eyes were the bright blue of robins’ eggs, and down her body spilled a silk dress the color of storm clouds.
Emeline let out a shaky breath.
“Mama?”
Rose Lark dropped the knife and the sharpening stone. They hit the soft earth with a thud. The roots of the cavern immediately grew over them, pulling both blade and stone deep into the earth where they couldn’t be retrieved.
Staring at her daughter, Rose took a hesitant step before lifting shaky fingers to Emeline’s face.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered as tears trembled down her pale cheeks.
Emeline shook her head furiously, reaching for her. “It wasn’t your fault.” She wrapped her arms around her mother’s frail shoulders, pulling her close. Her hair smelled sweet, like rosewater. Her thin body shook like a sapling in a gale.
