The specters converge on the Tower in a spiral of light. Flames burst to life like fireworks on top of the Tower’s columns, detonating the skyline and throwing a brilliant, beautiful light across the sand that travels like an aftershock. It rips through the desert and washes the kingdom in true memories of the past.
Where the Tower’s light touches, flames paint movingpictures. Sand becomes lush greenery. A river of embers glitters, molten light tracing the outline of a stream. Palm trunks rise as columns of coiling flame, fronds unfurling in tongues of heat. Vines are thin snakes of fire that wrap the bones of broken tents, forming pavilions of shade. The flames cleanse the air, and the sweetness of wet stone and tilled earth rises from the images made of light and heat.
The vision drapes itself over the kingdom so perfectly that, for a breath, we are living in it. Fire as change. Fire as promise. Fire as healing that reaches beyond applause and into the slow work of becoming whole.
The crowd ripples as everyone scrambles to the edges of the light, eyes wide. An adviser from the queens’ circle drops to her knees and presses her forehead to the sand. Children peer out from behind their awestruck parents. Dav and Tarek stand ankle deep in the vision of rushing, white-capped flames, dipping their hands into the river of fire. People stand still, wide-eyed and amazed, singed clothing hanging off their shoulders. Others laugh and cry in the same breath. Everywhere, hands reach toward the Tower’s light, fingers brushing at fiery visions, and the whole kingdom hums with the small, fierce note of wonder.
Again, Fortune says. Though maybe she doesn’t speak at all. Maybe the word comes to life inside my head, sounding exactly like her.
The Tower pulses in the distance, its glow surging upward like a beacon.
I pull air into my lungs and open my burned hand. I let the pain anchor me as proof of my purpose. This is why I was dragged through worlds, and I will not flinch now.
“Return,” I tell the Tower. “Remember.”
Sparks lift from my palm like they did from the altar, bright and buzzing as I pour myself into the kingdom, a living channel between the magick of the tower and the Kingdom of Wands.
The shredded tents quiver. Threads begin to glow at their ripped edges, tiny veins of light that seek one another out. They lift and pull, and stitch by stitch the rips close until the fabric is once again whole. Splintered poles groan and tilt toward each other, halves of snapped wood finding the right angle to fit back together. The jagged ends bind. Sap bubbles warm and clear where the breaks meet, then hardens with a soft hiss.
Cries break across the camp as wounds knit closed. A boy’s split lip smooths under his mother’s shaky fingers. A dancer who had been clutching a twisted ankle lets out a sharp little sound as the joint rights itself with a pop. A man who’d been cradling his arm and panting beside a shredded tent exhales as bone slides back with a wet, settling click.
I feel it all flow through me: the loosening of muscle, the settling of bone, the pain extinguishing. Around me, the kingdom exhales a ragged mix of sobs and laughter and astonished gasps as what was broken stitches itself back into being.
A cool breeze blows in from the Tower and gusts across the dunes, carrying the scent of wet clay. Ribbons of water burble up through the sand like veins drawn onto the earth. They widen into channels that rush between ridges and pool in low bowls, catching light like quicksilver. Tiny shoots unfurl with shocks of green so bright they’re almost glowing. Moss gathers along the shorelineof the rivers and grows over scorched patches in the sand until they’re fuzzy and bristly. In minutes blades thicken into grass, grasses gather into tufts, and what was a dry and barren plain becomes a verdant crush.
The Everspring has been remembered, has returned, and with it the Kingdom of Wands rises again, an oasis reborn.
Twenty-Seven
There is a fierceness in my chest that wasn’t there before, a proof left on my skin and in the way the kingdom breathes that I’ve done something enormous. I did this. I pulled the Tower and the kingdom back from the ash, and in doing so, I pulled myself a little straighter too. I have unlearned a hundred small lessons and learned, with a terrifying, thrilling clarity, that I have the power inside me to heal more than myself.
Still…Declan is gone.
The finality of it sits like cold iron in the pit of my stomach.
His body is a shadow at the edge of my sightline. It anchors me in the worst and truest way. I learned, painfully and proudly, how to make the kingdom remember. Now I must learn what to do with memories I cannot possibly forget.
Around me Wands mends, the Everspring sings, and people reach for one another, mouths shapinggrateful, unbelieving laughter. I want, with a fierceness that squeezes my heart, to pull that same healing around him, to have enough magick to unmake his ending. But it seems that some healing is only for the living.
It doesn’t stop me from hoping, from casting a whispered plea to the universe, “Please let me save him. Let me bring him back.” Tears press hot against my eyes as I hold those impossible wishes in my chest.
I force my fingers open, a small gasp shredding out of me as pain flashes up my arm.
I sway on my feet. My legs are rubber, my hand throbs, every nerve in my body collapsing into wet noodles. The world tilts, and warm callused hands close around my shoulders and catch me before I fall.
My heart vaults with the impossible hope as I whirl around to face—
Tarek.
“Are you feeling all right?” he asks softly.
“Yes, I—” I try to answer, but it’s hard to form words around the despair sinking my heart. “I’m tired. And Declan—” My eyes sting, and I squeeze them closed.
Tarek pats my shoulder, then quiet and practical, he asks, “What would you have us do with him?”
I don’t know how to be anything but small and broken and messy in that moment. And that’s okay. So I give myself permission to be imperfect.
Air wheezes out of me in one long, wet sob that feels like it might never stop. My body trembles, chest convulsing as I cry. Tarek wraps me in a hug, and I let my tears soak into his shirt, leaving hot, dark tracks.
