My world narrowed, filled by my exiled cousin’s face. I barely noticed the Guardians closing in, barely heard their shouts or the wind, or felt the rain. I saw Berin part from the night nearby, a stolen spear in one hand and his axe in the other, but I couldn’t go to him.
Thray, my cousin, was here. Thray was Arune’s sister—half-sister. Thray was the one I’d come to heal.
I dropped my staff and raised my knife again. Part of me was shocked I still held it—the other part of me was appalled. But the need to heal, to make well, to erase what I’d just done was overwhelming.
I slit my palm without a moment’s hesitation. The cut was too deep. Pain made me reel and sway, earning a frantic glance from Berin, but I immediately regrouped. I pressed my shaking hand onto the ice and began to sketch runes in the air with the other, voicing their names in low, raw sounds. Each syllable vibrated in my chest, and every beat of my heart brought a torrent of blood and pain.
Magic burst around my splayed fingers. Blinded, I clenched my eyes shut and kept humming, kept willing Thray to heal and wake, the ice to break, for something in this terrible night to be good and right.
Fighting broke out around me and the wind turned arctic, thick with the threat of snow. Rain began to freeze, coating the world—and my clothes, my hair—with flurries of ice.
Hands hauled me back. I cried out in frustration and willed the last scraps of my magic into the tomb, but I was hefted bodily from the ground. A Guardian locked his arms over my chest, pinning my own arms to my sides.
I saw Feen, her face smooth with contained rage, and a dozen more Guardians. I saw Berin, on his knees with his own sword at his throat. And I saw the vestiges of my lavender-gold magic, trailing with my skin into the earth. It felt like lightning, but it looked like the long, slow pulse of a firefly on a summer night. Time seemed to slow in the swell and crest of its gentle light.
Soon, that light was not alone. A newer, eerier illumination awoke. Feen spun and half a dozen other Guardians looked in shock—up at the ash tree.
Foxfire flared on the roots closest to Thray’s icy tomb and spread, tracing symbols upon the dead, barkless trunk. At first I thought the shapes random, twists and turns of knots, the paths of burrowing insects and small cracks. But as I looked closer, I saw runes. Hundreds, thousands—countless symbols, covering not only the roots and the trunk, but stretching up into the branches far, far above our heads. There the lights blurred in the rain.
The Great Tree, the Hask’s sacred ash at the edge of the world, was a Binding Tree.
Feen stared at the glowing trunk, obviously trying to gather herself. Then she advanced, ignoring the panting, kneeling Berin and stopping before me—standing right over Thray’s grave. Beneath the ice, I noticed, my cousin’s neck had knit together.
Feen spoke in Hask, and though I didn’t know the words, I understood their meaning. A promise. A warning. A threat.
They dragged us off into the night. The last thing I saw before a cloth was bound across my eyes was the gleaming tree, brightest where I had stood and Thray still slumbered.
Then I saw no more. But I felt the brush of wind on my cheeks, thick with the scent of summer storms, and the rain began to turn to snow.
* * *
My arms hurt. I shifted, trying to ease the strain, and felt something bite into my wrists. Vines. No, what a strange thought. Ropes, of course. Ropes, because I’d been captured.
My first thought was for Berin, and by extension Isik and Arune— summer storms and swirling snow. If both Miri-blooded men had arrived, why was I a prisoner? And where was Berin?
My mind jumped to Thray’s face, locked beneath the ice. Had my healing worked? Was that why Arune hadn’t helped me—he’d gotten what he wanted and fled?
I was alone in a stone chamber, windowless and close, but not lacking in comforts. Pallets and bedrolls lined the walls and a table was pushed off to one side, chairs scattered back with apparent haste. I was in the middle of it all, sagging on my knees. A Guardian outpost, perhaps?
A high triangular fireplace was built into the wall in front of me, along with two equally triangular doorways—one to my left, the other to my right. The impression of them was familiar, significant somehow, but my jumbled mind couldn’t settle on why.
My wrists were bound with a rough rope tied to a sturdy lantern hook, embedded in a thick, rune-etched root. Foxfire pulsed in the carvings, and I blinked in recognition.
I was still on the island, likely back under the tree in an area Berin and I hadn’t found before.
Stranger.
The voice came to me as eerily as it had the night in the forest, humming up through the ground and radiating from the root above my head. But this time, I felt a stronger presence—the same one I’d felt beneath the tree. And this time, I knew with certainty where the voice originated from.
Whoever was trapped in the Binding Tree was speaking to me.
“Hello?” I replied, voice just above a whisper.
The sound of footsteps came from outside and Feen appeared, framed in one of the doorways. Her simple dress was unbelted, loose around her lean frame in a way that made her look like any common woman, but her expression set her apart. Calculating, self-possessed, and oddly… resigned?
Her eyes flicked to the glowing runes on the root above my head. The foxfire dimmed, but only slightly.
Satisfied, Feen stepped into the room. “You’re awake,” she observed.
“Who is in the tree?” I asked. “Where is my brother?”
“If you promise to listen to me without interruption, I will tell you. We’ve much to discuss.”
I blinked, realizing that I’d understood Feen’s words. She spoke in the Divine Tongue, like Arune and Isik. Like the Miri.
Intuition stirred, linking together fragments of information and memory. The shape of the doorways. The roots. The tree. The history Logur had spoken of. The Divine Tongue, and the way Feen looked at me now.
“You’re a woodmaiden,” I guessed.
To my surprise, Feen cracked a smile. She shook her head—not in negation, but pleasure. “I’m honored you’ve seen through this face… I’ve worn it for so long, sometimes I fear even I forget what I am.”
She stretched out her arms to either side and let out a long breath. As the air left her lips, she changed, just for a moment. I saw a woman with skin of smooth, pale birch, eyes like knots with polished amber hearts, and fingers as graceful and delicate as willow wands.
With the next intake of breath, she was Feen again, plain and dignified.
Silence filled the room. Feen watched me for a reaction and I kept my expression as closed as I could, contemplating why she would reveal herself to me. And what fresh dangers this knowledge might unleash.
Slowly, I found my way to my feet, battling cramped muscles. The tension of the rope eased, though not enough to gain ground on the woodmaiden.
As much as I wanted to escape, I sensed how critical this meeting was. I needed to know what this creature was doing here, masquerading as a woman, guarding a Binding Tree at the edge of the world. I needed to know who was in the tree, calling to me. I needed to finish healing Thray, and learn where Berin, Arune, and Isik were.
“Did you make this tree?” I asked, holding on to the rope to steady myself as my muscles shuddered. “Or do you just guard it?”
“Again, I’m flattered,” Feen said, unfolding one of the Hask’s fabric stools nearby and perching upon it. “I haven’t the power to make something like this. Not alone, at least. But I had a hand in its creation, yes, and now I watch over it. You should know that your companions have fled—both the Winterborn and the… other. They found my nature rather surprising, it seems, and did not expect my Guardians to be able to see them. So, Yske, know that I wholly control you and your brother’s fate.”
I imagined Berin wounded and unconscious, bleeding somewhere beyond my sight.
But I wasn’t afraid. There was no space for fear now, not with Berin and Thray under threat. Not when I’d broken my promise to myself and stabbed a Guardian. I felt as though I were only half of myself—shallow and cold.
I lifted my bound wrists to show the woodmaiden my swollen and reddened skin. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Feen accepted this and began to speak. “I’ll tell the story as simply as I can. Given your power and the company you keep, I assume you’ve some familiarity with the history of the world, of how those you call the Miri were given stewardship of the High Halls, and the Four Pillars— Thvynder, Eiohe, Imilidese, and Fate—left. But there is more—more that I suspect you do know, though your brother does not. Not all kinds of Miri went to the High Halls after its creation. We cherished our places in the rivers and forests—until, too late, we realized the blessing we had been excluded from. The sustenance, and power, of the High Halls could be taken. Used. That power took the natural affinities of the Miri in the Halls and turned them into gods. They changed, and we did not.”
A chill swept over me. Were Logur and Feen allies, somehow? Or had they been, long ago?
“You know that the Miri rose against the Four Pillars, the true gods,” Feen went on. “They bound Thvynder. They wounded Eiohe before he fled. Fate wove herself into time to escape them and maintain some control over the world. But Imilidese? She never returned at all. She was not there on that day. She was absent from creation and could not be found.”
Feen stepped closer, lowering her voice to a rich, sonorous murmur. “Imilidese was in the Unmade,” the woodmaiden confessed. “She returned too late to help her siblings and emerged here, at our lake on the edge of the world. Here, she found us.”
“Us?” I repeated.
“Us. Woodmaidens and rivermen the Miri had rejected and driven away after their rise to divinity. We came east looking for peace and our own source of power, and we found it. We found a door to the High Halls.”
“Logur was one of you,” I surmised.
“Yes. But Imilidese threatened to take our newfound power from us.” Feen glanced toward the fire as it popped. “Not only that, she threatened to destroy the world altogether—to unmake and remake what she and the other Pillars had forged. To bring about the end of ages, in fire and ash. So my sisters and I, together with the rivermen, used the power we had found to bind her.”
I took in her every word, my mind working quickly. Binding a god. The threads of power beneath the tree. The foxfire, igniting countless runes on dead, starved wood—both here and in the High Halls, as I’d seen that night with Isik. The presence I’d felt when I pressed a hand to the roots.
“Imilidese is the one in the tree, and her influence has spread,” I murmured. Every other thought fled my mind. The whispers I’d heard in the forest had been a goddess, a Pillar. All this time Thvynder had been absent from creation searching for his sister, she had been here in the east, bound like a common demon.
Feen nodded somberly. “Yes. Many of us died in the struggle— burned up by the very power we tried to harness. It stripped the rest of us, parching us and leaving us little more than humans. Few lived to see the tree forged and the runes carved. And only two—myself and Logur—remained here once the deed was done.”
The magnitude of what I’d learned threatened to overwhelm me. Feen and her kin had stopped Imilidese and saved the world from Unmaking. Should I be grateful? Terrified? The being before me had thwarted the will of a true god.
“What happened with Logur?” I asked. “You’re enemies now.”
“We had a disagreement.” Feen rested her hands in her lap. Her words were careful, her tone neutral, but even that piqued my curiosity. A disagreement yet to be resolved?
The woodmaiden went on. “The doorway to the High Halls was sealed in the binding of Imilidese—an unforeseen repercussion. Logur was obsessed with finding a way to reopen it, but if that were to happen, the power that holds the tree together would flow back into the High Halls, and Imilidese would be free. So I drove him out. He found his own people, time passed. Now the tree weakens and Imilidese’s influence spreads with the foxfire, but the binding holds, and will for centuries to come. Unless Logur can break it. He serves Imilidese now. I don’t know what she has promised him, her whispers in the dark… but he is deceived. If Imilidese is freed, we will all die.”
The thought of Imilidese unbound was terrifying, too huge to be reckoned with. I teased out smaller details first, the details that might free Berin, Thray and me, and find us allies.
“Do the Hask realize what you are?” I asked.
“No,” Feen said. “But they know I am more than they can see—a priestess, blessed with long life by the Bear. But my true power was stripped by forging the tree. I am a shadow of what I was.” Her voice was thick with bitterness, raw with perceived injustice. “I have given everything for this cause.”
“Your cause is protecting the tree from Logur,” I clarified. “How can he not see what would happen if the rift was remade?”
“His mind is closed to me. Perhaps Imilidese has promised him a place in her new world…” As she spoke, Feen looked at the roots spreading overhead. “Perhaps he simply doesn’t believe she would destroy creation. But he is wrong. Her rage will be unquenchable, after so long imprisoned.”
“Then you and I are not at odds,” I stated, holding on to that hope. “If I’d known—”
“None of this can be known,” Feen cut me off. “There will always be misled beings, human and otherwise—those hungry for power and willing to do anything to achieve it. Imilidese may be bound, but she is not silent. You’ve seen the foxfire in the forests, spreading west. It has even spread into the Unmade itself, stirring shadows where there can be none.”
I couldn’t keep a shiver from creeping up my spine. So that was what the Arpa had seen. “It has begun to touch the Eangen High Halls too.”
Feen frowned grimly and went on, “I have done what I could. I battled for years to keep her presence a secret from the broader world, but now… The Arpa came. You have come. And everywhere the foxfire spreads, so does her voice.”
I thought of the stories I had grown up with, both in the human world and the High Halls—tales of the end of the age, when the world would be reforged in fire and ash and born anew. I’d no desire to live to see that day, see the forests I loved burn or the people suffocate, lungs clotted with ash.
Would Thvynder condone the actions of Feen and her counterparts, or shatter the binding and release their sister? I trusted my god, but no matter what the outcome was, if the truth of Imilidese’s presence in the East was discovered, our world would change.
“My question now is—” Feen looked to me, head cocked to one side “—can you heal the Binding Tree, and repair Imilidese’s bonds? Or will your power heal the doorway to the High Halls and release her instead?”
I stared. “Heal the tree? I can’t do something so—”
“True, you can’t do any of it,” Arune affirmed, sauntering into the room. Behind him came Isik, who supported a beaten and bloody Berin. “Hello, Feen. I really am impressed—you hid your nature so very well.”
Feen stood up quickly, but not quickly enough. In a blink and a burst of bitter winter wind, Arune was at her side, Berin’s sword leveled at her throat.
“I assume you can still die,” he said to the woodmaiden, scratching his cheek with his free hand. “Right? Or else—” He waved the tip of the sword. “—I’d feel silly doing this.”
Feen’s expression shuddered into a rage-filled sneer. “I curse the day you came out of the west.”
“Regrets are useless things.” Arune eyed her for another moment, then lowered the sword and made for me. “Go away. Revenants have taken the lakeshore and are about to land on the island.”
Feen did not move for a stunned moment, then she spun for the door. She eyed Isik and the bloodied Berin as she approached, but neither moved against her.
“Stay out of the way and get off the island,” she spat, slipping past the both of them. She stabbed a finger at Isik. “Especially you, Son of Esach. You foolish child.”
Isik looked after her incredulously, but she’d already vanished.
The rope suspending me went slack. My shoulders and back screamed as my arms finally lowered, but I focused on the Winterborn, and my brother and friend in the doorway. My relief at the sight of them was potent, threatening to weaken my already trembling knees. I found a watery smile and steadied myself.
“I trust you’ll keep your word, Eangen?” Arune slit my bonds efficiently. He nodded toward Berin, his expression becoming unreadable. “Your brother tells me you know Thray.”
“Yes.” As soon as the ropes fell away, I held out my hand for the sword. “Give me that.”
The Winterborn put the hilt in my hand with a shallow bow and watched as I slit my palm for the third time that night. My stomach turned and my head spun, the myriad aches and pains of the last hours meeting with sleeplessness and anxiety in a sordid rush. Again, I strengthened myself. Again, I let the blood fall, coating my fingers and dripping onto the hard-packed floor with barely audible drips.
My brother met my gaze as I approached, heavy with pain and promise. Isik watched me too, expression inscrutable, as I sketched runes in the air and breathed them into Berin’s flesh. His wounds immediately began to knit. I healed my own aches too, though I let my open palm continue to drip, refilling the well of my power.
“Wonderful,” Arune said, following us with a light step and a broad grin. “Let’s go wake up Thray.”