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Pulling up my skirts, I run as hard as I can, grabbing the ax. I nearly slip on the ice and the blood, but I do not break my stride. I run straight for the tree.
She comes! the tree screeches. Its roots reach out and tangle round my ankles, bringing me down hard. The ax skitters from my hand and lands just out of reach.
“Gemma…”
I look up. Above me in the tree’s maze of branches, Circe is wrapped in a cocoon of twigs and vines and sharp nettles. Her face is gray, and her mouth is blistered and swollen. In her hands is the dagger.
“Gemma,” she calls in a strangled voice. “You must…finish it…”
The twigs tighten round her neck, cutting off her warning, but not before she drops the dagger to the ground below. I scrabble for it in the thick roots.
Gemma, would you give this all up? For what? What will you return to when you have finished me? the tree intones. A careful little life? No longer special? No longer anything at all?
“I shall be different,” I say.
That is what they all say. The tree laughs, bitterly. And then their magic grows less and less. They grow up, away. Their dreams fade like their beauty. They change. And when they finally know that they would like this, it is too late for them. They cannot come back. Will this be your fate?
“N-no,” I say, turning away from the dagger in the vines.
“Gemma!” Kartik is calling me. But I cannot look away from the tree, can’t stop listening.
Stay with me, it says sweetly. Like this, always. Young. Beautiful. Blooming. They will worship you.
reature howls in anger. “They deceive us! This is not the one!”
“Find the one. The true one.”
“Over here,” one of us calls.
“No, it is I. I am the chosen one!” another shouts from the battlefield.
“I’m the one you want,” comes yet another voice.
The creatures screech. “They confuse us! How can we see when they use the realms magic against us?”
A Poppy Warrior shouts, “It is that one by the rock!”
“No, it is this one near me, I tell you!”
We are everywhere, and it is too much for them. They fall into fighting each other.
I shout over their din. “Why should you fight for the tree’s glory? For the trackers’? They will let you die and take all the magic for themselves. The tree will rule you as the Order did.”
The creatures eye me narrowly, but they listen.
One of us calls, “You will still be slaves to someone else’s power. Do you honestly believe they will share it equally with you?”
Amar paces on his white steed. “Do not listen to them! They are deceivers!”
A skeletal creature with long shredded moth’s wings shakes his spear above his head. “Why should we give the power to them, when we can have it for ourselves?”
“What will you promise us?” another man asks. His skin is as gray as rain.
“Silence!” The trackers open their hideous cloaks to reveal the screaming souls within. “You see what we wish you to see.”
The Winterlands creatures cower and fall again under the spell of their leaders.
She works her enchantment against us. Find the girl, the true girl, the tree says. Do not let them deceive you. She will be the one they try to protect.
