Chapter Three

Forest Fire

Elloren

Northern Forest

Eighteen days after Xishlon

“Ancient One . . . no . . .”

I throw my palms to III’s bark, desperation burning through my core. Because my Wyvernbond to Yvan has been severed by III, Yvan completely absorbed into III’s huge expanse.

Every nerve lit with concern, I claw the wall of bark before me with newly sharp, deep-green nails, fearful that III will douse Yvan’s Icaral of Prophecy fire and slay him, mistaking his power for Vogel’s. The sudden absence of my bond to Yvan is an excruciating thing, like a crucial piece of me has been torn away.

“Release him!”

I cry, pressing my palms to III’s trunk, wanting to dive in after Yvan, even if it means the obliteration of us both.

My surrounding bonded Forest is disturbingly still, its elemental aura like a trapped breath. And more intimidating yet, III’s energy and encircling green mist are gone, only a residual tang of monumental power reverberating in the air, as if the Great Tree has drawn every last trace of its elemental might and focus inward.

Toward Yvan.

A gentle hand comes to my shoulder. I turn to find Yulan beside me, a deeply concerned light in her lichen-lashed eyes, her heron kindred hugging her side.

The dam holding back my flood of heartache shatters.

“I can’t lose him,”

I tell her as the tears break free. “I’ve already lost my fastmate, Lukas. I can’t lose Yvan too.”

I draw my wand hand toward my chest, as if searching for a cinder of Yvan’s Wyvernbond there. But find nothing.

I slump, begging III through tear-soaked lips, begging the entire Forest, to spare Yvan, to no response.

Only silent, immovable bark.

Errilith lowers his giant raven head to my arm and nudges me with his midnight beak, his power coursing around me in protective ropes of pitch-hued mist, an otherworldly stillness flowing into my lines via our kindred link. But Errilith’s eerie Deathkin reassurance does nothing to assuage my wild fear. Two obsidian snakes slither onto my lap, then another, dawn’s light momentarily dimming.

I turn and meet Hazel’s black stare. The slender Death Fae-Dryad has lowered himself to one knee beside me, branch-horned Sylvan just behind him. Hazel’s coal-black eyes are focused on mine, horns rising from his short, midnight hair. He holds up his III-marked palm. “The Forest aligns with unlikely ones,”

he reassures me, his subterranean voice vibrating over my skin as more dark snakes slither up from the ground and curl around his lower body.

A sudden thought strikes. “How much of a lag did your portal have?”

Fear spiking, I look to Sylvan and meet his penetrating, pine green stare. “And how long was I in III?”

“Our portal held a fifteen-day lag,”

Sylvan answers. “You merged with III for three.”

My mind whirls, my time in the Dryad portal having seemed to span a matter of seconds, not fifteen days. An unmooring sensation grips hold. Because I’ve just made a horrible mistake. Even if Yvan survives, time has been on Vogel’s side. Vogel’s forces are likely almost here, poised just outside this Forest. And if Vogel strikes while Yvan is still caught in III . . .

“Are there other Dryads in this Forest?”

I question Sylvan, Yulan, and Hazel, my alarm burgeoning.

“Our Dryad’kin live in the Forest canopy to the north,”

Sylvan says, giving me a severe look. “We are soldiers who protect the Heart of the Forest.”

“Vogel is coming,”

I warn them. “He warred with III to keep hold of me. He knows where I am. And he’s coming for Yvan and for me . . .”

“Well, he won’t get through our warding!”

Oaklyyn spits out, her fists tight around her branch weapon, her wolverine growling as she glares daggers at me along with mushroom-tressed Lyptus and the huge Dryad with the bear kindred, who they call Larch. “Our wards have stood for generations,”

Oaklyyn cries, “keeping all non-Dryad’kin out. Especially those who would burn down our Forest.”

A flash of defiance blazes through me. “The Forest is wrong about Yvan,”

I snarl back. “The trees think Yvan’s and Vogel’s fires are one and the same, but they’re not.”

I swiftly explain Vogel’s brief theft of our Wyvernbond.

I give Sylvan, Yulan, and Hazel an imploring look. “You have to convince III to spare Yvan. Please.”

Feeling as if the world is spinning off its axis, I turn and press both palms against III’s dark trunk once more, desperate to sense even a trace of Yvan’s fire.

“The Forest aligned with you despite your fiery lineage,”

Yulan says, her melodic Dryadin shot through with vast compassion. My tear-blurred eyes swing to hers as I grasp the trace of hope in her tone like a lifeline. “Over the past few days,”

Yulan softly continues, “I gained a sense of your Icaral’s valor. III will get to the root of who he really is. And III will accept him.”

“III will not,”

Lyptus snaps, like the lash of a whip. The expression on her face is unforgiving, her words a blow, devastating in their finality. “Forest binding magic requires connection,”

she stresses and glances pointedly at her silver panther, who lets out a low, resonant growl at me. “The kindred bond is a conduit for that connection.”

Lyptus nods brusquely toward my flock of giant ravens, a merciless light filling her green eyes. “There is no Forest creature that can withstand an Icaral of Prophecy’s fire.”

“Then what will happen to him?”

I demand, feeling like the ground is giving way.

“Dryad’kin, listen to me,”

Yulan prods, the sympathy in her gaze willing my attention. “To dwell inside the Natural Matrix is a journey of faith.”

This does nothing to assuage my fear.

I look to III’s canopy, to the sky above. Please, I implore the heavens, sending my words out to any deity that will hear me. Please bring Yvan back to me . . .

A burst of shimmering green light blasts from III, and I flinch back, along with the others, III’s aura of elemental might and green mist suddenly whirling around me, blazing from the Great Tree’s core, my kindred flock of ravens cawing.

III’s bark bulges outward and morphs rapidly into the shape of a man before the bark gives way and Yvan is crouched before me, my palms pressed to III’s bark just above his shoulders, his chest heaving with ragged breaths, his wings extending.

He raises his head, and his shocking newly violet-fire eyes don’t so much meet as collide with mine, his gaze burning through the space between us.

A strangled cry escapes my throat as I hurl myself at him at the same time he surges toward me, my rise of emotion so strong I fear I’ll blaze apart. Yvan grabs tight hold of me, toppling us both to the ground, the two of us hurtling into a kiss.

Violet-tinted fire blasts through me, and I arch against Yvan as he sears our Wyvernbond back into being with potent force, III’s enveloping aura flowing through the connection.

The love in his kiss sends a volcanic line of emotion through me, his fervid mouth feeding the whole, heightened force of his fire into mine as I send my Dryadfire into him, hot tears giving way.

Yvan breaks the kiss and draws back, his eyes glowing such an incandescent violet it steals my breath. Our bond pulses hotter than ever before, in an unbreakable pillar of intermingling violet and green flame.

“Elloren . . .”

Yvan says, my name torn from the base of his throat. He lifts his hand to show me his palm.

My heart stutters.

There, marked on his palm, just as it is on mine and on the palm of every Dryad in this circle, is an imprint of III.

“This cannot be,”

Oaklyyn rages as Yvan and I both rise. Her elemental aura lashes at us with such vehemence that I startle, her wolverine bristling as her hand lashes out toward Yvan. “He has no kindred and never can have one!”

Yvan meets Oaklyyn’s blistering stare without flinching as III’s embracing green mist twines around us both. “I have been linked to a kindred,”

he tells her in fluent Dryadin. He stops, his eyes widening as shock ripples not only through his fire, but through everyone’s elemental power in response to his sudden fluency in the Forest’kin language.

Yvan closes his III-marked palm into a fist, then unfurls it once more, revealing a compact, deep-purple pinecone.

Sylvan, Yulan, and Hazel step forward to scrutinize it, an astonished expression overcoming Sylvan’s raptor-sharp, pine green features as he lifts his gaze to Yvan’s. “III has given you a kindred Forest in the East.”

Yulan’s shocked expression is a mirror of Sylvan’s. “This is rare,”

she marvels, her heron’s wings fluttering, “to be kin-bonded to an entire Forest . . .”

“Which he’ll promptly burn to the ground!”

Oaklyyn snarls, her stance a tight coil of fury. “Sylvan, don’t let this happen! He’ll be the death of it!”

“How can this be?”

Yulan presses Yvan, her lovely features tensed with concern.

Yvan silently, almost ceremoniously, steps back from us all, lowers himself to the ground and pushes the cone’s lower half into the mossy soil. Then he raises his hand, palm down, just above the cone. The violet flame in Yvan’s eyes takes on a hotter glow, his fire aura suddenly burning with such potency it sends a current of heat through my rootlines. I shiver against the sensation as Yvan’s III-imprinted hand begins to glow violet.

He splays his fingers with emphatic force, and a stream of purple fire blasts down from his palm. I flinch as the fire meets the cone and it bursts into flame, its coating of shiny violet resin beginning to melt. I wait anxiously, confused by his actions, the entire surrounding Forest seeming to hold its breath alongside me.

But then, the unexpected happens.

Yvan’s flame dies down, and the cone unfurls and sprouts thin, violet pine needles and soil piercing roots. The needles rapidly fan out and multiply, new branches forking and needling until a small purple pine seedling stands below us.

Surprise echoes through the Northern Forest’s aura as the Dryads trade astonished looks.

All except one.

“I know this tree of the East,”

the huge, branch-horned Dryad—Larch—rumbles, his enormous black bear kindred lumbering behind him as he approaches. He points a thick, green-glimmering index finger at the seedling. “This is a Nightwood Pine. From the Eastern Realm’s Zhilaan Forest. It needs fire to germinate. Fire regenerates this Forest.”

Oaklyyn is blinking at the pine seedling, a look of internal war ravaging her face. Hazel smirks at her, his expression one of triumph as snakes twine around his black-clad form.

Yvan meets my eyes in a blaze of heat that sends a shiver of warmth down my spine. “III bonded me to the Zhilaan’s Nightwood Forest,”

he explains as powerful energy wraps around both our bond and his core of fire, tugging him toward the northeast and channeling our bond’s violet-green flame toward this Forest that loves fire. “Bonding to the Zhilaan was like being welcomed home,”

he enthuses, his voice hitching around the Dryadin word for home before his words break off, his fire charged with emotion. His gaze swings to the Dryads. “I never wanted to be a force of destruction,”

he tells them. “This weapon of the Prophecy. It always went against my Lasair pull to heal.”

“I believe this of you, Lasair’kin,”

Yulan assures him as she affectionately strokes the head of her heron kindred.

“But when III showed me the Zhilaan Forest,”

Yvan says to her, “I learned that my fire is able to spark new life and protect it.”

He gives me an emotion-saturated look. “I felt like, for the first time in my life, I was being shown a place where I truly belong.”

“I imagine we have much in common, Winged One,”

Hazel quietly interjects. “Both of us widely reviled, you as Icaral and I as Deathkin. Our ‘vast evil’ condemned by the pious while they mutter prayers of protection against us both.”

Hazel’s expression darkens, bitterness in the depths of his midnight eyes as he casts a chilling look at Oaklyyn. “But the Forest cares not for the boundaries of humankind. The Forest is creating its own circle of Dryad’khin, and no one can keep you out once the Forest has welcomed you home.”

The word Dryad’khin strikes me as revolutionary in its implications—a term that embraces not only the Dryad’kin, like me, who possess actual Tree Fae lineage, but also the khin of the Dryads, including those who are simply aligned with both them and the Natural World.

My thoughts careen toward Lukas and his insistence to me on the night of the Yule Dance that Mages had Dryad lineage. An achingly vivid memory surfaces, of Lukas’s subversive smile and the flecks of snow catching on his black hair. My throat tightens, sorrow piercing my heart as tears sheen my eyes, the sudden desire to have him here with us so intense I feel gutted.

“Lukas should have had this,”

I rasp out to Yvan in a ragged voice as I rage against Lukas’s selfless end. “He would have been transformed by III too.”

Yvan’s invisible fire flows around me, and he nods and draws me into an embrace, my forehead pressed to his hot skin as he holds me tight and I rail against both the loss of Lukas and what was lost to him his whole life—his connection to Forest power.

And to the Dryad he always was.

“He lost everything,”

I whisper as the tears come, Yvan’s hot hands splayed against my back, keeping me close. “He gave up everything, for all of us.”

“I know it, Elloren,”

Yvan says, voice raw, empathy blazing through our bond. “I know he did.”

I tense against the undertow of pain, devastatingly clear on what Lukas would say if he were with me at this moment.

Have your moment of grief, Elloren. One moment.

Then pull yourself together and fight back.

I meet Yvan’s searching look as he raises his palm to cup my cheek then leans in to kiss my forehead, his warmth suffusing every inch of me, the love he’s flooding through our bond an anchoring force, enabling me to quickly pull myself together.

“I was offered a binding to the Zhilaan Forest,”

Yvan confides, his violet-fire gaze locked on mine. “I accepted. And vowed to use my power to protect it.”

Sparks flash at the edges of his eyes. “I’m being called there, Elloren. It’s like a migratory pull. We need to gather everyone together—my mother, your family, and all our allies—and join them all to the Natural Matrix. I understand now, what you felt and saw inside of III. This fight . . . it isn’t what we thought. We’re standing at the precipice of a complete unraveling of the Natural World.”

Yvan’s mention of our families and allies sparks a renewed awareness of Tierney’s disappearance, and worry for her rises. I turn to the Dryads. “Where is Tierney?”

I ask. “And the Death Fae she was with?”

“After they led the Errilor Ravens here,”

Sylvan answers, “they were drawn east through an Asrai water bond. I sensed it empathically as they disappeared.”

My mind whirls.

East. Perhaps drawn back to the Vo River by Tierney’s Asrai’kin to fight the Shadow in a land decimated by Vogel’s forces. And Vogel has had eighteen days to regroup and plan attacks, not just against Yvan and me, but against the entire East.

Yvan turns to Oaklyyn, a conciliatory light in his eyes. “I have more of an understanding now,”

he ventures, “of why you were willing to battle me if it meant saving the Forest from being destroyed—”

“You understand nothing, Icaral,”

she spits out at him, her eyes bright with hate.

“Then teach me,”

he rejoins, meeting her ire with impressive steadiness as he wraps his hand around mine. “It’s true. I have Icaral of Prophecy power. So use it. Use it for the Forest.”

Hazel tosses a sly look at Oaklyyn. “So many unlikely ones being called into the Forest’s circle,”

he croons. “Having trouble keeping them out, Oaklyyn?”

Oaklyyn’s livid gaze swings toward him. “Just like I had trouble keeping you out, halfling.”

The world pulses aggressively with Hazel’s power as he gives Oaklyyn a chilling look.

Oaklyyn takes a confrontational step toward him, slashing her hand toward Yvan and me, her lips trembling, “Just like them, you’ll bring nothing but death to the Forest. And then you’ll feast on it.”

Hazel’s black lips pull back into an otherworldly snarl, his teeth blackening and elongating. “You know nothing of what I am,”

he bites out, gnashing his jaws at her.

“We need to align,”

Yvan says to both Hazel and Oaklyyn. Their combative gazes snap toward him. “III’s message to me was clear. We’re all needed in this fight.”

Yulan’s gaze lights on Oaklyyn, a beseeching look on her delicate features. “Things are changing, Dryad’kin,”

she murmurs.

“Things are always changing,”

Hazel agrees, his deepened voice seeming to rumble up from under the ground. “But even more so now.”

His midnight gaze slides back to Oaklyyn. “Hold on to the rigid lines of the past at your own peril, Dryad’kin. It will bring Void Death down on us all. I stand with Natural Death.”

He swipes a black-taloned hand toward the giant ravens surrounding us. “As do they. The Errilor are here because there is a Reckoning at hand, and we must subvert it. Together.”

Answering strands of black, misty power flash into being around my ravens, the suspended mist flowing out to encircle us all as confusion blazes through both my fire and Yvan’s.

“What’s a Reckoning?”

I ask Hazel.

Hazel levels his enthralling gaze on me, the world pulsing darker as Errilith pulls our thread of connection toward the ground, images of mass extinctions of animals and plants and humans flashing through my mind, gooseflesh rising on my skin.

“A Reckoning,”

Hazel warns, “is when Natural Death is forced to wash over Erthia. It descends in response to a severe Unbalancing of the Natural World.”

I briefly meet Errilith’s mournful stare before Yvan and I exchange looks of alarm, and I remember III’s vision of Shadow power advancing on Erthia’s last stand of the living Forest.

Yvan meets Hazel’s otherworldly stare head-on. “We need to pool our power and get our defenses ready to protect this Forest. Vogel will attack—”

Black Witch!

A flash of vermillion and gold fire blazes through my vision, and I startle, an urgent hiss invading my mind, everything around me searing from sight.

Raz’zor? I send out through the fire, grasping for a connection, but Raz’zor’s fire disappears as quickly as it ignited in a spangle of red and gold flame, a trace of purple sparks trailing in its wake. I whip my stunned gaze toward Yvan and catch a trace of gold, red, and purple fire streaking through his eyes as well, a mirror of my own surprise evident on his angular features.

“What just happened?”

Sylvan demands. “I sensed incoming Wyvernfire.”

“It’s . . . a dragon we’re horded to,”

I answer as my thoughts spin. “Raz’zor . . .”

Yvan’s nostrils flare, as if he’s scenting the flame. “I sensed Naga’s fire merging with Raz’zor’s, along with a host of other Wyverns.”

Another flash of Raz’zor’s fire hits me, my vision searing to flames once more, my heart launching into a hammering beat. Because I can read danger in the urgent way Raz’zor is sending his power out to me. Rough images form in his fire: a winged horde of broken dragons, taking flight; a line of portals, arches flickering; a curved Noi sword; an Amaz axe.

“Multiple armies,”

I gasp, looking to the Dryads as my vision clears. “Multiple forces are setting out. And they’re all converging.”

My gaze collides with Yvan’s, alarm surging through our joint fire. “Yvan . . . they’re all coming here.”