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Slowly, Rosetta asked, “What happens if we don’t find it? Or we don’t in time?”
I swallowed and looked down at my hands. “I’ve dreamed about it many times. I’m back at Greythorne, in the maze, and Kellan is
kneeling at my feet. And I’ve got a sword, and I . . .” I bit my lip. “I think I kill him. And then I say the words of the bloodcloth ritual: ‘Bound by blood, by blood undone.’” I shuddered. The Bleeding Dream was never pleasant to relive, even awake. “Thank you, Rosetta, for what you’re doing; for helping me. Because of you, that terrible dream will stay just a dream.”
“Yes,” she said. “Certainly.” Abruptly, she snapped her book shut and stood. “We should get them up. We’re wasting the day.”
Outside, the rain was slowing and the pink threads of morning were beginning to show through the clouds. We ate a light breakfast of dried apples and raspberries brought from Rosetta’s pantry. Then we set out for the tower. This was perhaps the most arduous portion of our trek, as the terrace gardens had been overtaken by the same thorny growth we’d encountered at Forest Gate; only here, it was wilder, stronger, with shoots of vines nearly as thick as my arm, bearing daggerlike thorns that would not prick you so much as impale you. It was as if the power intersecting in the ley lines beneath the tower was feeding the flora as well, turning it into something otherworldly.
Zan and Kellan took out their swords, while I brandished a scythe and Rosetta a shovel. Onal remained in the back of our slow procession, hiking with her arms crossed. “I’m too old to help you,” she said with a look that dared anyone to argue otherwise. “Let me know when you’re finished.”
“You should have made a tunnel through this already,” Kellan said to Zan, wiping his brow.
“We did,” Zan said. “It grew back.”
We hacked and hammered our way into the thatch, but it was slow going. And we had to be especially careful not to get nicked by the thorns; after fifty feet of tunneling, we realized that the bloodleaf that had once covered the tower had spread out and interwoven itself into the thorns. Here, to be pricked was to be poisoned.
The intensive work took the better part of the morning and most of the afternoon, but shortly after the sun reached its apex and began its trek to the horizon, we managed to break through to Aren’s tower. I went in first, stepping into the lowest floor. It was dimly lit by the collected light from the dozens of small windows that circled up in a spiral to the top. The spire had been the epicenter of Achlev’s destruction, a needle around which the terrible storms had pivoted. Even now, when all was quiet, I could hear the ravaging wails of wind and the booming rumble of thunder in my memory as I, once more, climbed up the staircase to the top.
The months of being open to the elements had not treated the tower or its matron statue kindly. Aren’s visage was worn away and crumbling, rendered nearly unrecognizable in a few short months after standing untouched for the previous five hundred years. Still, as I looked upon her again, I was struck by a pang of loss, as if she were not the eerie wraith that had dogged my steps for the better part of my existence, but an old and fondly remembered friend.
The weather had not erased all the remnants of the ordeal Zan and I had endured before the storm. There was still a black scorch mark where Cael had been rendered to dust, his blood still ingrained in the space between the stones. And the bloodleaf that had cradled Zan while he died was still there, surrounding the spot as if it were memorializing what had taken place there, leaving a perfectly shaped depression where he’d breathed what had seemed his last. It was as if the vines were preparing themselves for his inevitable return and creating a welcoming resting place for him to lie upon.
“Can you feel it?” Rosetta said in awe. “It’s amplified through the tower.”
“Yes,” I said. The knot of ley lines thrummed like a beating heart somewhere far below, resonating up the ancient stone.
“No wonder King Achlev wanted so much to protect this place,” she said. “The forest has taken up the job now, I suppose.”
“We got here easy enough,” I said.
“You thought that was easy?” Kellan asked, staring over the edge at the sea of thorns through which we’d so painstakingly tunneled.
“If the forest hadn’t wanted us to get here, it wouldn’t have let us through,” Rosetta said.
Onal was standing over the scrubbed-out remains of my triquetra, drawn in blood in the center of the platform. “If it wasn’t the forest drawing us here, it was something else,” she said. “And we should be wary of the intrigues of immortal beings.”
“You’re almost immortal yourself,” Kellan said.
“Exactly,” Onal replied.
Rosetta coughed to smother a laugh. “Beware her intrigues.”
“Please,” Zan said, staring down at the—his—bloodleaf. “Let’s get this over with.”
Rosetta knelt down and began preparing the portal pattern with her quicksilver string, laying it as wide as the tower would allow, a wealth of purposeful loops and whorls and zigzags. Then came the sombersweet smoke. I breathed it in deeply.
“Now,” Rosetta said, “things should work better this time around. But it’s very important that you listen for the call to return and answer it immediately.”
“I will,” I said sincerely. “Trust me.”
But, looking from face to face, I could tell that they didn’t.
19
I lay down across the pattern and settled my hands against my stomach. Above me, Aren’s statue seemed to be hovering like a fretting mother while the late-afternoon sky stretched across the expanse behind her. I closed my eyes as Rosetta began her monotone monologue, easing my consciousness across the border into the spectral world, and I felt myself leaving my light-haired material body behind and taking up my dark-haired subtle body instead. Soon the world was dropping away, replaced by currents of smoke and silence.
Concentrate, I told myself. Think of the bell. Think of the horseman. Is he Mathuin Greythorne?
