Raskel thumps his stick once. “The boy is right. The locket is the key, but it must be used here, at the Rootline Gate, built as the anchor point between worlds. The locket should act as the tether. If the bond is strong enough, it can pull her fragments toward a single point in time.”
The weight of what he’s saying settles over me. Months. Months of searching, of reading, of screaming into the dark for answers. And the answer was hanging around my neck the entire time, waiting for me to stand in the right place. I assumed it was just another relic Jo left behind. A comfort. Not a key.
I could kill something. But that can wait.
“Then let’s do it. Now.”
“It’s not that simple,” Raskel says, because of course it isn’t. “The ritual requires the garden to be prepared. The gate needs to be opened properly, not that hack job you did with the portal. That was just a temporary crossing. The Rootline Gate is older magic. And you need someone on this side to hold the boundary while you pull her through, or the whole thing collapses in on itself.”
“I’ll do it,” Leo says immediately. “Tell me what to do.”
I study him for a moment, this broad-shouldered human. He’d walk into Wynmire barefoot if it meant getting Elle back. I recognize that feeling. I’ve been living in it for months.
“Fine,” I say. Then I turn to Sarnyx. “You need to go back.”
Her expression doesn’t change, but I see the slight tightening around her eyes. “Kaelren—”
“Wynmire can’t be unguarded. Not with the boundary fracturing like this. I need you to keep things stable, keep the settlements from panicking, and keep an eye on Eltrien, Nimor, and Vashael.”
“You don’t trust them?”
“I trust them, but they need a leader." I hold Sarnyx’s gaze. “You’re the only one I trust completely. Go back. Hold the line. If anything changes, if the fractures get worse, send word immediately.”
She stares at me for a long moment, then nods once. Thorns retract. Decision made.
“Don’t die over here,” she says.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“I mean it, Kaelren.”
“So do I.”
She leaves through the portal without looking back. That’s Sarnyx. No theatrics. No drawn-out goodbyes. Just work.
What follows is the strangest hour of my life, and I have lived a long and unusual life.
Raskel directs the preparations with the authority of a general, the temperament of a hornet.
Leo and Sarah clear debris from the garden: dead plants, fallen branches, the remains of the carnivorous sunflowers.
Bryx and Mora help, though Bryx spends more time complaining about the heat, the dirt, the general indignity of manual labor, than actually moving things.
I work on the elm tree. Or what’s left of it. The old tree stands at the center of Jo’s garden, massive and ancient, its bark scarred with age. In Wynmire, it would be a crossing tree. A living doorway between realms. Here, Jo disguised it as an ordinary elm. But the magic is still there, buried deep within. I can feel it when I press my palms to the bark. Old. Patient. Waiting.
“You need to open the gate within the trunk,” Raskel instructs from below, having climbed onto a garden stool to supervise. “Jo sealed it when she came through. You’ll need to unseal it carefully and channel the bond through the locket.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“The last three hours suggest otherwise.”
Peeble, who has appointed themselves chief morale officer, divides their time between pestering Leo with increasingly personal questions about Elle’s childhood and narrating my failures to anyone within earshot.
The elm’s gate responds to my magic slowly, reluctantly, like waking something that’s been asleep for decades. The bark splits along lines I can barely see, hidden in the grain. Light seeps through the cracks, pale gold, and the locket against my chest burns.
Not painfully. Purposefully.
I close my eyes and reach for the bond. That thin, impossible thread connecting my present to her scattered existence across time. I pull.
