Weeping, Rose held her daughter tightly, as if, this time, she didn’t intend to let go.
When Emeline pulled away, both of their faces were shiny with tears.
Lacing their fingers together, Emeline drew her mother into the glow of the forest’s heart and kept singing. She sang her own true songs, and when the very last one spilled from her lips Emeline sobered, thinking of the tree her grandfather planted on the day she was born. A hawthorn rooted at the edge of the woods. She thought of a boy who once quoted poetry to her against the bookshelves, grown into a man who stood at her side when she faced down a king.
He’d gone where she couldn’t follow.
When her song ended, when her magic was all sung out, Emeline sent a message to him through the trees.
Come back to me.
FORTY-THREE
AS THE RED SUNrose over the winter wood, the Song Mage trod the quiet halls of the Wood King’s palace, cutting through courtyards and promenades, her boots ringing on the tiled floors. Below, the King’s City lay like a patchwork quilt, all rust-red rooftops and gray-cobbled streets covered in snow. Beyond the wall, the trees were stripped bare.
Every once in a while, Emeline caught a faint whiff of spring in the air—the smell of buds on the cusp of unfurling, of green things poking up through the snow. Spring was coming.
Perhaps it could thaw her frozen heart.
Five months had passed since she’d sung to the Heartwood and tithed everything that once mattered most to the woods. Since then, the forest had reclaimed itself. The Wood King sat upon his white throne once more, his eyes clear, his spirit uncorrupted. The shiftling court had slowly resumed their human forms, coming back to themselves one by one over the last several months.
Emeline’s life here had fallen into an easy rhythm. With her memories returned to her, her friendships with Sable and Rooke were restored, and she spent most evenings with them and Grace. When she wasn’t in the King’s City, she visited her grandfather—who lived in his own house again, cared for byshiftling nurses sent from the king and visited regularly by his friends. She spent time at Tom’s, where her mother lived, safe from the things in the woods.
Her music career was over before it had even really begun: there were no more stage lights, no more late-night gigs, no more tours. But for the first time in a long time, Emeline was writing and singing her own songs—at The Acorn, for the king.
For herself.
For the first time in a long time, the woods no longer came to claim her; she had claimed the woods.
And though she frequently missed the things she’d lost, more and more Emeline felt that she was where she was supposed to be.
She only wished Hawthorne was wherehewas supposed to be.
She slowed as she passed the crystal room, reminded of longago lessons with the king’s stoic henchman. Thinking of a starlit dance beneath that sparkling dome.
The memory pricked her with sadness.
Emeline moved quickly on. There was something she needed to do before she rode Lament to Edgewood today.
Finally, she arrived at an arching palace door bordered by thick green ivy. Painted across its surface was the king’s crest: a crowned white willow sprouting from a seed. The hedgemen standing guard opened the door and let her pass unimpeded.
Emeline stepped into a small forest clearing.
Her boots left prints in the snow as the white birches gleamed around her. In the distance she heard the softwhoooof an owl, and across the pond ahead, a man perched on a small gray boulder. Three black ravens hopped through the snow at his feet, leaving tracks. He hunched over, murmuring to them, and from his back sprouted three green saplings growing towards the sky.
“Song Mage.”
His voice was still that of a wild, ancient thing. But in the wake of the broken curse, the Wood King seemed … tamed. As if the curse had taken him out of himself and he was slowly returning.
“Forgive my intrusion, sire.”
At the sound of her voice, all but one of the ravens scattered, taking to the air. The last hopped onto the boulder next to the king.
The king scooped the raven in his hands, cradling it. “You’re no intruder here.”
She felt like one. Emeline glanced down at her wet boots and torn jeans. She should have changed before coming—this was not the proper attire in which to address a king.
“I came to ask about the hawthorn,” she said.
