Chapter Six

Living Library

Lucretia Quillen

Northern Dyoi Mountain Range

Lucretia is pulled through the Forest’s dark embrace for an expanded time, drawn along the thread of a force that runs through the heart of the Natural World, every one of her rootlines lit up bright with it.

Love.

She follows that draw toward the center of her own full-to-bursting heart and careens out of the Forest’s darkness. Instantly dazed and disorientated, she finds herself on her hands and knees, palms to moist earth, a dense purple Forest with prism-edged foliage surrounding her.

She pulls in a euphoric breath in response to autumn’s power-amplifying surge of light magic, the sound of burbling water hooking her senses. She glances toward the stream rippling beside her, its crystal clear water throwing off sparks of reflected color and sunlight, her water lines straining toward it.

Tears stinging her bespectacled eyes, Lucretia takes in the early morning mist hanging suspended over the Forest’s ground like delicate gauze. Her Dryad’kin rootlines thrill to the sense of the water cradled in it. A sense of the watery pathways feeding the Forest’s entire root network is suddenly filling her mind and anchoring her rootlines to the ground, every sense alive, alight . . . connected.

Her awareness of that thread of love she followed to this place warms as she pushes herself to her feet, then turns and raises her hand to make contact with the pale lavender trunk of the Eastern Birch she emerged from.

Lucretia is flooded by a stronger sense of the tree’s connection to water, her strengthened water lines rippling to more potent life. Smiling, she closes her eyes, breathes in the water-cradling mist and drinks in her newfound awareness of the aquifer running deep beneath the Forest. She goes deeper, her rootlines linking to the vast network of the East’s streams, her lines lit up by the Forest and Water’s interwoven nature, the trees not only protecting and replenishing the aquifers by channeling water downward to them, but also stabilizing the very climate around them by drawing water up through their roots and sending it out as water vapor, the whole, swirling dance an intimate partnership.

To support Life and Love.

Joyful tears spill from Lucretia’s eyes as her rippling connection solidifies to the Forest aquifer beneath her feet. My kindred, she realizes, her newfound bond to the aquifers of the East locking around both her water aura and her heart.

A birch branch drops down before her. Swept up in the tide of the surrounding Forest’s affection, Lucretia reaches down to pick up the branch and is shocked anew not only at the feel of the living branch’s reestablished connection to the surrounding trees through her rootlines, but also to find her skin has turned a deeper, richer shade of green, its glimmer intensified, a mark of the Great Tree, III, whom the Forest revealed to her, emblazoned on her palm.

The Nature Anchoring Tree murdered by the Shadow.

Grief clenches Lucretia’s throat, and she has to swallow it back as she sheathes her living branch, her focus drawn to a lingering stretching sensation along her ears. She reaches up to find subtle points there, a resurgent shock eddying through her.

Home, she realizes. I’ve finally come home.

Yes, she’s finding home when it’s on the brink of being lost to everyone forever, but still, she’s finally found her true place. Not as a Mage at all.

But as a Dryad’kin of the East.

Her tugging sense of that thread of Love tightens, the rustle of approaching footsteps sounding.

Lucretia straightens and peers into the Forest to find Jules in the distance, striding closer, peering into the woods to their left.

Her heart leaps into a tight, impassioned rhythm, every nerve coming alive.

Jules looks as worn-out and fierce willed as she’s ever seen him, his clothing mussed, hair a tousled mess, his spectacles a spiderweb of cracks and bent to a slight tilt on his nose.

“Jules, I’m here!”

she calls out to him, then gasps, shocked to find herself speaking a whole new language, flowing dry and leafy over her lips, the words seeming like the truer, richer names for things.

Coming to a halt, Jules lifts his gaze to meet hers. His eyes widen.

He breaks into a sprint over the brush, rapidly closing the distance between them, then catches her up in a passionate embrace, an emotional sound bursting from his throat.

A joyful cry escapes Lucretia, love for Jules rushing through her in a euphoric tide so strong that she fears her magic might leap clear through her rootlines and straight into magic-free Jules in a drowning rush of water. Her wave of feeling breaks out into dense, visible mist, swirling around them, as she’s inundated with a sense of the surrounding birch grove sending out embracing energy to encircle them both.

“My love,”

Lucretia cries against Jules’s warm cheek, her knees almost buckling at the feel of his perennially tousled brown hair under her fingers, her invisible, Forest-linked water power streaming around him.

He brings both hands up to cradle her face as they draw slightly back from each other, tears streaming down her cheeks, her deep-green face mirrored in his bespectacled eyes, his own tears splotching his glasses, his lovestruck look expanding her heart with an ache that’s almost too joyful to bear.

And then his lips are on hers, desperate and devouring, and she kisses him back just as intensely, wanting to flow straight into him and never let go.

Breaking the kiss, Jules huffs a soft sound as he takes hold of her hands and draws back a fraction, his gaze raking over her from head to toe, taking in her transformation. “Lu . . . look at you.”

“Join with us,”

she offers in the Common Tongue, reaching out to grip his arm. She holds her palm up, displaying its mark of III.

Jules’s brow knots as he studies the Forest’s defiant imprint then tenderly takes hold of her hand. He meets her eyes once more, and heat ripples over her skin, that searching warmth in his gaze able to undo her every single time.

“This connection to the Natural World,”

she tremulously enthuses, “it’s like nothing you’ve ever felt before.”

It’s almost too joyous to bear, the power of the Natural Matrix thrumming through her lines, strong as spring rapids. Fluid with rejuvenation. With connection. “Being joined to the Forest,”

she says, “it’s like connecting to the intricate center of everything.”

Jules lifts her hand and kisses her palm right over III’s image, and Lucretia’s pulse quickens in response to the level of passion in that kiss. But then Jules’s eyes tighten, an expression of intense chagrin in them. “Lucretia, I can’t.”

“You can,”

she insists, her mouth breaking into a heart-expanding smile. “You don’t have to be Dryad’kin to be Dryad’khin. The Forest wants you too. It wants all of us. I can feel the trees’ invitation swirling around you.”

Jules glances at the surrounding trees, a grimly serious look entering his eyes as he brings his gaze back to hers. “I’m a historian, Lu. And that has demanded . . . required that I not align, to do any justice at all to my calling in this life.”

Love eddies through Lucretia, as well as a tight rush of respect for Jules’s fierce guarding of his own mind. Along with an appreciation of how it’s set him apart, kept him on an often-painful path of intense solitude, reading deep into the night by candlelight, stacks of history books surrounding him, delving into confusion over painful and brutal truths.

Then attempting to use all that conflicting knowledge to work for a more just world.

For everyone.

“I know it’s your calling, Jules,”

she concedes as her water aura rushes around him in a potent stream. “But you can’t do it justice cut off from all this.”

She motions toward the prism-edged Forest world around them. “It’s not an alignment in which you lose your free mind. It’s an opening up of the most important library there is on all of Erthia. All the archives. All the libraries. Every page you turn. They’re already supported by trees.”

“Dead trees,”

Jules reminds her, his expression unsettled as he peers closely at her.

“That’s true,”

she concurs, pointedly glancing at the color-decorated trees, at the glorious, complex, miraculous tangle of Waters and Forest and Life. She breaks into a smile once more. “But now it’s time to enter the library that’s living.”

Jules’s breath shudders through his throat as he blinks at her, his features tensing as he looks up toward the Forest’s canopy and then back at her.

“All right, Lu,”

he concedes, his eyes taking on a fierce, intellectual light. “Bring me to your living library.”

Lucretia’s breath stills, the charged energy of the momentous shimmering in the mist around them. Pulse thrumming, she takes his hand and raises it, presses her lips gently to his palm and kisses its warm center.

Jules’s breath hitches as she takes her time, kissing every part of his hand before she meets his enamored gaze. “Place your palm to the tree, Jules.”

With their gazes locked, Jules draws his hand away from hers and brings it to the Noi Birch’s smooth, lavender bark.

A prismatic glow shivers to life around his hand. He pulls in a harsh breath and suddenly falls to his knees. Lucretia drops to her knees beside him, her magic swirling around him as Jules presses his forehead to the tree, a chromatic glow spreading around his form. Birch bark is suddenly forming around him and then drawing him inward until there’s nothing before Lucretia but the trunk.

Heart in her throat, Lucretia waits, her palms on the birch. Erthia seems to still on its axis, and Lucretia stills in turn. One heartbeat. Then another. And another. The pulse of the whole world slows as Lucretia closes her eyes and breathes.

And then, after a time, it’s Jules’s warm shoulders under her palms instead of smooth trunk, and Lucretia opens her eyes and meets his awestruck gaze, an amber-lit late afternoon having descended.

Jules’s breath is coming in uneven gasps, a streak of deep green now running through his messy brown hair, his spectacles gone. A Noi Kestrel with silver feathers and bright-violet eyes is perched on his shoulder. Catching his breath, Jules lifts his palm, and the kestrel takes wing and alights on the branch just above them.

Lucretia’s heart swells.

There’s an image of III marked on Jules’s palm, identical to the one marked on her own.

“Where are your glasses?”

Lucretia wonders.

Jules glances toward the kestrel. “The Forest merged my sight with my kindred’s.”

He stops, blinking in obvious surprise over the Dryadin language flowing from his lips. “It wanted me to have a more expansive view. Of everything.”

He pauses again, swallowing, seeming overcome, before a fierce determination lights his brown eyes. “A new history needs to be written,”

he states, voice ragged. “Not centered on just one group of people or another.”

Lucretia waits, her heart fair bursting with an outflow of hope.

“The history we need right now,”

he says, a revolutionary understanding in his eyes, “is a history of the Forest and the rest of the Natural World.”

He shakes his head and huffs out a frustrated breath. “In all my years as a historian, I . . . I thought I was striving to remain impartial. But I was biased in the worst of ways. I missed the history at the center of everything.”

He looks to the III mark on his palm, face tense, as if in devastated apology.

“Then stop missing it,”

Lucretia prods.

He sets his gaze back to hers. “This is why confusion was essential. Because none of the other historical points was ever at the true Center of things, although they all tried to be. It was all always . . . off-kilter.”

“Except when it was rooted in the Natural World,”

Lucretia ventures.

He nods, holding her gaze. “And in the force of Love. For all of this. And for each other.”

He stops for another moment, blinking at her, as if in awe. “Lu, I can sense your water power. This new link to the Forest . . . it’s opened up a stronger link to you.”

On instinct, Lucretia takes his hand and presses their palms together, III mark to III mark. Both their eyes widen as Lucretia is filled with an intimate sense of a trace of her water magic flowing straight into him.

“You can feel all of it, can’t you,”

she marvels, a thrill igniting and rippling through her every rootline.

He nods, his gaze grown a bit liquid. “Lu . . . I can. I can feel what your power is like to possess. And your kindred link to the Water Matrix . . . the aquifer beneath us . . .”

“I can sense an edge of your true power, as well,”

she enthuses, overcome by a glimpse of his mind opening up, the whole history of the Forest clicking into it, straining to merge with her too. A tracery of images flash through the edges of her mind, everything this Forest has witnessed throughout time imprinted in its very wood, shimmering through every internal ring.

A blazing look enters Jules’s gaze. Lucretia has witnessed this fire-struck look only a few times over the years, when she caught him reading something truly illuminating—something that vastly increased his understanding, shattering everything he thought he knew.

“I want to read every tree on Erthia,”

Jules states.

A smile lifts Lucretia’s lips, and she places his palm over her own heart. “You can start by reading me, Tree’khin.”

The feel of Jules’s warm palm has her senses careening back toward his connection to the Forest’s library, and she realizes, more fully, how powerful Jules has always been in his own magic-free way.

And then he’s pulling her close and kissing her, and she can feel him reading the Waters of Erthia in her as he deepens the kiss and Lucretia connects more strongly with his mind, reading how the Natural World’s Waters have figured into all of history.

How they’ve driven history.

And how the world truly needs a new history.

An Erthia-based history.

“You know . . .”

Lucretia groans as Jules moves to trail kisses down her neck, her body arching against his with the growing, all-consuming desire to merge. “Vo mystics believe that the truth is like a light at the center of a circle,”

she says. “We all see a piece of it. But we need all of us to have a grasp of its full illumination.”

She draws back, and their eyes lock. “I want you to see my light,”

she offers, her breath hitching with desire, every swirl of her magic intuitively sensing that joining with him fully will create a stronger link. That this is part of Erthia’s power too. “Jules, let me fully connect you to my waters.”

Clearly grasping what she’s offering, Jules flicks his tea-hued eyes over her, a molten light seeping into them. His lips quirk, a stronger spark of want lighting his gaze and sending a strong ripple through Lucretia’s water power. “You’re bold, Dryad’kin,”

he teases. “It seems you imagine me an easy mark.”

Lucretia smiles and runs her hand over his chest, thrilling to how his gaze on her has deepened, growing half-lidded with desire. “All those years of solitude?”

she purrs, teasing back. “With that pent-up ability to kiss so well that you buckle my knees? Yes, Jules, I imagine you’re an easy mark.”

Jules laughs as he embraces her, Lucretia laughing as well as he nuzzles her neck and traces a kiss along its base before glancing at the misty grove surrounding them. “Here?”

he asks, voice a bit ragged.

Lucretia answers by lowering herself to pluck some Sanjire root, the Forest floor thick with the small, purple-leafed plants. “Where else?”

she purrs. “We’re Dryad’khin now.”

A huff of a laugh escapes Jules. “So very un-Gardnerian.”

Lucretia’s smile broadens. “So completely un-Gardnerian. But so completely Dryad’khin.”

His expression takes a turn for the ardent as he draws her into a deeper, thought-scattering kiss, Lucretia’s chest rising and falling against his, her water power circling tighter and tighter, low in her center and his.

“All right, Lu,”

he rasps, his lips tracing the edge of her jaw.

She can feel the heat of that contact flowing straight down to her toes. Straight through the low, sensual vibration kicking up through her Forest-bonded lines.

“Root me,”

he offers in an enticing whisper before kissing her in a way that makes her want to join him to her power’s flow. “Root me to your Forest and pull me clear under your Waters.”