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I press my palms against the rough bark of the trunk and am lost.
Images dance around me like the fractured pieces in a kaleidoscope. In one sliver of the prism, Mae sits at a table crowded with an opulent feast. As she finishes each dish, another arrives to take its place. Beneath the table, lean dogs sit, panting and hopeful. They fight each other for scraps, tearing into each other’s flesh till they are bloody, but Mae takes no notice. She will never be hungry again.
I see Bessie in a fine gown made completely of gold and jewels, an ermine cape resting upon her shoulders. She walks past the rows of bedraggled, dirty women sewing in the factory where she lost her life, until she reaches the owner, a fat man with a cigar in his mouth. She slaps him hard, again and again, until he cowers at her feet, no better than an animal. Ann is bathed in the glow of footlights. She bows to her audience, drinking in their thunderous applause. Wendy has a small cottage with a rose garden. She waters the buds and they flower into magnificent blossoms of red and pink. Mercy rides in a fine man’s carriage. I see Felicity dancing with Pippa in the castle, the two of them laughing as if at a joke only they are privy to, and then I see Pippa sitting on the throne, eyes blazing.
Beside me, Pippa wears a rapturous smile. “Yes,” she says to no one I can see. “Chosen, chosen…”
“Look closer,” the tree whispers, and my eyelids flutter. Everything I lace tightly to myself is loosed.
I open a pair of doors and I’m back in India. It must not yet be summer, for Father and Mother sit drinking their tea out of doors. Father reads aloud from Punch, and it makes Mother laugh. Tom is a blur of a boy as he runs past with two small wooden knights locked in fierce battle in his hands, that one impossible lock of hair falling across his eyes. Sarita scolds him for nearly upending Father’s old urn. And I am there. I am there under a long ribbon of bright blue sky, not a cloud to be seen. Father and Mother smile upon seeing me, and I feel a part of them all; not separate and alone. I am loved.
“Come to me, Gemma,” Mother calls. Her arms open wide to receive me, and I start to run, for I feel that if I can reach her, all will be well; I need to catch the moment and hold it tightly. But the more I run, the farther away she gets. And then I am in the cold, dark parlor of my grandmother’s house. Father in his study, Tom on his way out, Grandmama with her calls to pay; none of us seeing the others. All of us alone, a few odd beads strung together by sadness, by habit, by duty. A tear trickles slowly down my cheek. This power’s truth is like a poison I cannot spit out.
Small pale creatures crawl from under the rocks and stones. They touch the hem of my gown and stroke my arms. “This is where you belong, where you are needed, special,” they say. “Love us as we love you.”
I turn my head, and there is Kartik, bare-chested, walking toward me. I take his face into my hands, kissing him hard and recklessly. I want to crawl inside his skin. This magic is nothing like the magic we have played with before. It is raw and urgent, with no facade to hide behind. This is what they don’t want us to feel, to know.
“Kiss me,” I whisper.
He presses me against the tree; his lips are on mine. Our hands are everywhere. I want to lose myself to this magic. No body. No self. No concerns. Never to be hurt again.
The Tree of All Souls speaks inside me. “And would you have more?”
For a moment, the Temple magic fights within me. I see myself standing before the tree while Kartik screams my name, and I feel as if I’m struggling to wake from a laudanum dream.
“Yes,” someone answers, and it isn’t me. I struggle to see who has answered so, but the tree’s branches hold me fast. It holds me like a mother and coos as softly.
“Sleep, sleep, sleep…”
I fall through the floors of myself, waiting for someone to catch me, but no one does, so I just keep falling into a dark that never ends.
Later—I cannot say when, for time has lost all meaning—I hear a voice telling us it is time to go. I am suddenly aware of the cold. My teeth chatter. There is frost on my friends’ eyelashes. Without a word, we turn from the tree and stumble back the way we came. We pass the bodies hanging from the trees like ghoulish chimes, their entreaties whispered on the wind: “Help us….”
The rest of the journey out of the Winterlands is a dream of which I remember little. My arms are scratched, and I cannot recall how they have come to be this way. My lips are bruised, and I wet them with my tongue, feeling small cracks in the skin. When we step across the mist-shrouded threshold of the Borderlands, I ache with a desire to turn back. The strange twilight beauty of the Borderlands no longer excites. I can feel it in the others as well, can see it in their backward glances. We step over the vines that slither from the Winterlands. They stretch their arms, reaching closer and closer to the castle.
Bessie speaks as if in a daze. “It’s like it knew me. Really knew me. I saw m’self and I were a proper lady—not pretend, but respected.”
“No fear,” Felicity murmurs, stretching her arms overhead. “No lies.”
Pippa twirls around, faster and faster, till she falls down laughing. “It all makes sense now. I understand everything.”
Gorgon is waiting for us in the river. I try to avoid her, but she sees me slipping behind a tall wall of flowers.
“Most High, I have been looking for you.”
“Well, you have found me, it seems.”
Her eyes narrow, and I wonder if she can smell the forbidden on my skin like another’s sweat. The other girls run wild. They wear a new fierceness that brings a gleam to their eyes and a flush to their cheeks. Felicity laughs and it sounds like a call to arms. I want to go to them, to relive our experience in the Winterlands, not suffer under the watchful eye of Gorgon.
“What is it?” I call.
“Come closer,” that syrupy voice demands.
I stand on the grass a good ten feet from where Gorgon sits on the river. She turns her head and takes in the sight of me—hair a ruin, arms scratched, skirt torn. The snakes dance hypnotically. “You have been, I see,” Gorgon says.
“And what if I have?” I answer, defiant. “I had to see for myself, Gorgon. How could I possibly govern without knowing? The Tree of All Souls exists, and its power is immense!”
The snakes round her face writhe and hiss. “Promise me you will not return to that place until you have made the alliance. Most High, your power—”
