Chapter 24 Cosmic Jokes （And Gifts）

24

Cosmic Jokes (And Gifts)

I couldn't move.

The weight inside me felt leaden, impossible to shift. I felt like I'd been pinned down like a moth by a mountain, or possibly a fallen planet, something that had plummeted from the firmament to land directly on my chest. My throat ached as though it had been scrubbed with steel wool, and my insides sloshed from side to side even though I couldn't lift so much as a finger.

Thirst boiled inside my throat, rivaled only by panic. Because no matter how hard I tried, my garnet pulsing against my throat, I couldn't budge myself so much as an inch back toward the other side of the veil.

Normally, the avatar of me that existed on this side—the physical form that my spirit and awareness took—felt exactly like my human body. But I was so spent, so terribly overfull, that the idea of flinging my metaphysical self back across the veil felt worse than impossible.

Like something I'd once dreamed I could do, the way children dreamed of flight.

Tears began pooling in my eyes, spilling hot down my chilled cheeks. Ivy would think I'd broken my promise to her, I thought, anguish splaying itself inside me like a starfish wrapping spiny limbs around my ribs. That I'd chosen to stay, been too weak to do what I'd sworn I'd do. And Amrita and Kira and Saanvi—they'd all think I'd abandoned them, too.

Because if Elena was able to rescue me this time, reel me back in the way she'd done twice before, she'd have already done it.

Maybe not even she could budge me, swollen as I was with godsludge. Or maybe they'd all decided they didn't even want me anymore, after what I'd done. Killing a god was no small thing, even if it had been at a goddess's behest. Who knew how Belisama felt now, if she'd changed her mind after Chernobog's demise. If she hated me for having gone through with what she'd asked me to do in the first place.

So this was it, then, I thought, both grief-stricken and numb, my eyes unfocused on the crimson streaks of the clouds crawling across the sky. This was how it all ended for me. What a pinnacle of irony, I considered, with a faint, rasping chuckle. An involuntarily permanent residence on the other side, now that I didn't want it anymore.

How very fucking appropriate. Trust the universe to get the last laugh, and stick me with one final cosmic joke.

And how long would I even endure like this? What would happen to my physical body, untethered to my essence for too long? My vision felt like it was compromised already, warbling and fading, splintering the cloud cover above me.

But no; there really was something up there, piercing through those scabbed-over clouds. I squinted, trying to make it out. I'd never once seen anything up in this dead sky, no birds or stars, not so much as a floating seedpod. But this…this was something brown and green, branching toward me like a growing fractal, arrowing in my direction with tremendous speed.

"What the fuck?" I managed to mumble, straining to lift my head the tiniest bit. "A tree ?"

It was a tree. Or rather, the enormous crown of one, growing toward me upside down—as though its trunk and roots extended somewhere even higher above, driving through the pewter sky and into some other reality. And as it neared, rustling and swaying, boughs reaching toward me, I realized I even recognized it. It was a hawthorn, festooned not only with green-and-golden leaves and scarlet berries, but also with the creamy white flowers I'd seen on its branches the first time Ivy had introduced me to it.

This was the heart tree of the Thorn orchards, the one that had been planted by their founder, Alastair Thorn. The one by which he'd chosen to be buried after his death, rather than being interred in the Thistle Grove cemetery along with the other three.

But I didn't remember its flowers shedding a sapphire-blue glow, or the sparks of gold and silver that now crackled along its boughs. There were even misty ferns of ectoplasm curling between the forks of the thinnest branches, filaments of darkness threading up and down the bark.

"Daughter of the void," it greeted me in its creaking, hissing voice, like the shift of boughs caught in a high wind. Its branches drooped toward me, leaves brushing tenderly over my face. "I am sent by the many who owe an eternal debt to you. Will you allow me to do what you cannot? To wrap myself around you and bring you back where you belong?"

"You're here…to rescue me?" I croaked, incredulous. "You—did you come through the veil ?"

"Yes. But it is not in me to linger here." Its boughs shuddered a little, enough to convey distaste. "The air here reeks of death, and the ground could not sustain me, even if it does pretend to breed those false flowers. But it is your choice, daughter of the void. Will you stay, or have me fetch you home?"

I wasn't going to be trapped here, I thought, my heart stuttering through an exhausted attempt at a joyful leap. I was going home , back to Thistle Grove, to the world of flesh and blood and moon and sun. I was going home to Ivy Thorn, my best and truest love.

"Take me. Please." I tried to lift my hands toward the boughs to grasp on to them, barely managing to lift them an inch off the ground before they thudded back down.

"Do not exert yourself needlessly, daughter of the void. Nothing more is required of you; I have you now." The heart tree snaked its branches gently under my torso, wrapping them behind my shoulders and knees, lifting me with ease as it curled me against its slim trunk. I closed my eyes, overcome with vertigo at being flipped upside down, because the tree was growing inverted, exactly like I'd thought—as though the veil was actually in the sky, the other side hovering somewhere above us. "Rest, if you can. The descent will be slower than what you are accustomed to, when you make the leap yourself. And you have already been through so much."

I didn't need any instruction. As soon as I felt the four familiar, braided magics twining through the hawthorn's trunk, I could feel sleep tugging at me, consciousness dispersing.

I might not have been back in Thistle Grove yet, but in the heart tree's embrace, I was already as good as home.

I came to back in my body, with my head cradled in Ivy's lap, both her hands cupped around my cheeks—so much Thorn magic coursing through me I felt like I might not perish imminently, after all. The heart tree swayed above us, silvery-blue dawn light dappling through its leaves. The brisk air smelled smokily of fall; ripe apples and cider and crisping leaves and the sharp tang of the grass that grew over the root ball of the tree. My deprived senses were so keen I could even smell the dusty earth of the trunk itself, which had held such a sturdy grasp on me.

" There you are, Starshine," Ivy whispered as my eyes fluttered, seeking hers. "Finally back among the living. Our conquering heroine."

I attempted a smile, found my lips so dry they immediately cracked. "Told you I'd be back. But… so thirsty…"

Someone else came to their knees next to me, holding a straw to my mouth.

"You're going to want to guzzle, but drink slow," Genevieve Harlow instructed, deftly maneuvering the straw between my lips when I failed to properly lift my head. "Your sister told me what you normally drink after a banishment, but this is a much stronger combination of electrolytes."

"Why… she here?" I asked Ivy, once I'd chugged down four noncompliantly huge gulps. Genevieve was right; they hurt plenty going down, straining my raw gullet. But they also felt like absolute bliss, sweet and salty and life-sustaining, an IV bag pouring down my throat.

Genevieve's lips pursed, but she couldn't quite maintain the semblance of indignation. "Because the rescue tree was my idea," she said, with preening satisfaction. "So I wanted to be here when you finally came to. Everyone else has been at Honeycake Cottage for hours; you took absolutely forever to wake up."

"Sorry to have kept you waiting," I grumbled. "I was just almost dying for a while. Inconvenient, I know."

"Well, I suppose it was Delilah's idea, too," Genevieve went on, neatly ignoring me. "Credit where credit's due. But I was the one who envisioned the heart tree as the extraction mechanism. Then Lilah nailed down the particulars."

"It's true," Ivy said, stroking hair away from my temples, beaming down at me so brightly I felt like I was staring into a sunrise. "Gawain was involved, too, in the grand casting. We had a whole Cavalcade planning committee redux going on, along with some extra help from Cat."

"Tell me everything," I demanded after more gulps, discovering that between the liquid and the steady flow of Ivy's healing magic being pumped into my system, I was sturdy enough to prop myself up into a half-sitting position, leaning back into Ivy's embrace. She planted a ferocious kiss on top of my head, clasping me tight against her.

"Thought I'd lost you," she said, and I felt the hitch of her chest against my back. "Kindly do not pull any such shit again, no matter what kind of VIP asks you for a favor."

"Believe me, I have no desire to do anything like that ever again ," I assured her fervently, with a shudder of my own. "But how did you all pull it off? I could feel everyone's magic in the hawthorn when it took hold of me. All four families, commingled. How was that possible?"

"Elena was scrying while you were on the other side," Ivy explained, adjusting me against her so the back of my head rested in the curve of her neck and shoulder. "She saw…she saw what you did. To Chernobog."

"It sounded foul," Genevieve added, screwing up her pert nose. "I mean, ick ."

"Maybe we limit any further helpful contributions," Ivy shot back. "Considering Dasha just killed a whole god for Belisama, and for all of us."

"Yeah, dissolving and eating a god, many helpings of ick . Also, you're welcome," I added sourly. "So, I figured Elena probably knew what was going down. But she couldn't help."

"No, she said you were too… dense for even her to move. Issa and Talia tried to help her, but no dice. No one could budge you."

"And that was when I thought, we needed something bigger. A magical ladder, something able to span realms," Genevieve clarified. "And besides the lake and the soil itself, that tree is the oldest living thing in Thistle Grove. We brought you here and asked it for help, explained what we needed—and it agreed."

"But it took all of us," Ivy went on. "The Thorns to actually, physically grow it that enormous size. I took point on that, but we all did it together. A massive empathic link to help us cast something that large, which Cat then magnified, spreading it to encompass the other families."

That would've been the half fae neatly extricating herself out of my debt by assisting in my rescue. We were definitely square now, by anyone's reckoning.

"Then we needed the Blackmoores to turn it into an elemental bridge to extend through the veil, something that would actually function as a portal between two adjoining realms. Gawain—shockingly—was the one who sorted that out, but he and Gareth and Nina cast it together."

"So why the ectoplasm?" I asked, remembering the fronds of sooty black curling around the branches. "And the blue glow, was that Belisama?"

"The ectoplasm was so that the other side wouldn't reject the intrusion of something so large and so alive," Ivy replied. "Like masking its scent. And the blue was actually Emmy—she connected to the root system as the Voice of Thistle Grove, anchored it to the magic of the lake and the town itself. So that once it had you in its grasp, it knew which direction it needed to follow to return home."

"What about Maya-as-Belisama?" I asked, frowning. "She didn't help with all this?"

"She very much wanted to," Ivy said quietly. "But she…it hit her very hard, when you destroyed him. For all that she'd wanted it, asked you to champion her. Her grief is…Most of the Thorns can't even stand to be around her. So she's hunkering down with James, Cecily, and Emmy at Harlow House. With her closest blood relatives, technically."

"But it was what she wanted ," I whispered, my stomach lurching with the idea of having caused her pain, done something terribly wrong. "She asked me to do it!"

"Of course it was, love," Ivy reassured me. "And what a sacrifice you made for her. But the right thing sometimes still feels impossible to bear. You'd know about that, wouldn't you?"

I slumped against her, reeling with emotion, and the complexity that it had taken to execute this multidimensional rescue operation. "And you came up with all this?" I asked Genevieve, unable to hide the skepticism in my voice.

"Like I said, Delilah helped. But no need to sound like that. Planning is what I do, you know." Genevieve smiled at me, small but unmistakably sincere. "And after everything you did—all that ick —we were all pretty invested in bringing you back home."

Was this why, I wondered, the three other families had been drawn to Thistle Grove in the first place, once Elias had planted Belisama's essence here? So that I could be born centuries down the line, the anomaly capable of bringing down Belisama's lover and nemesis—and so that the families themselves could form the precise constellation of magic required to reel me back in once I'd done my part? Were deities really that prophetic and omniscient?

Or was all this simple serendipity, the beautiful, unpredictable dovetailing of fortunate events? A cosmic gift rather than a joke?

Chances were very good, I decided, that we'd never know. Whichever it was, the cards had fallen in the most auspicious way. And I wasn't going to be the one to question the inscrutable divine motives that had slotted them into the kind of arrangement that meant I got to see Ivy's beloved face again.

Against a dawning Thistle Grove sky, under the tree that had managed to tow me home.