At first I think the forest is dying.
Its leaves are decayed and cracked, petals from the wildflowers wilting across the floor and turning to mulch. Then I notice the way the trees sway on our arrival, as if to warn us of the dangers ahead.
Their leaves crinkle in continuous song and the great loom of the trunks cast shadows on the mossy ground, dancing to the squeals of whatever creatures are in the distance.
I quickly realize that I’m wrong. The forest isn’t dying.
Great swells birth from the ground beside the biggest trees, rising up and down with the wind. It’s like the hills are inhaling and exhaling beneath our feet.
The forest is alive and it’s breathing.
I slip back a step, unsteadied by the movement.
Nox catches my arm. “Stay close to me,” he says.
I swallow. “I don’t like it here.”
“I don’t think we’re meant to. It wouldn’t be much of a trial if we did. Not that I’m the one meant to be on trial,” he adds.
I can’t help but shoot him a sour look. “I thought you’d jump at the chance to see me in a life-or-death situation. It would save you having to kill me yourself.”
Nox’s sword is tight in his hand. “I’d prefer to watch from afar,” he says. “Why do you think I’m here?”
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “Maybe it’s because of the mark.”
I hold my gloved hand up, reminding him of the king’s crest beneath that we share. If my death and destiny are tied to Nox’s, then perhaps his are also tied to mine.
“What does the compass say?” he asks.
I look down at the small bronze object Eldara gave me.
The inner ring is a bright green, the tiny needle flickering between the swirls of north and east.
I squint and see that underneath the elaborately drawn N is a small inscription: Magic is never lost to be found.
“That way.”
I point up ahead, to a wide expanse of mossy hills, shadowed enough by trees that the sky above them doesn’t seem visible for miles.
“You’re sure?”
I wiggle the compass. “Stay north, right? It’s what Eldara said.”
Nox walks onward without waiting for me.
He’s so fast that I nearly trip over my own feet trying to follow. The tree roots stick up from the soil like hands reaching out for my ankles, so I have to watch each step.
It’s dark here.
Night, when I remember it being barely sunset just moments ago as we spoke to Eldara. I can see the moon, peeking through a line of dark clouds, which hide any chance of stars.
The forest soil is thick and sticky under my feet, coating my boots, but there isn’t any path to speak of. And it smells. There’s the musty odor of damp and rotten flower heads, but beneath is something worse.
It smells like blood.
We walk for a while, long enough for the night to turn to something darker. The moon is dim and smudged overhead.
“Are we going far?” I ask.
I can’t stand the silence. It makes way for the cries of the forest.
When Nox doesn’t reply, I press again. “What kind of trials do you think will be ahead?”
“Having to put up with you is a trial,” he mutters under his breath.
I glower at him and come to a stop beside a nearby bush.
It’s covered in sickly-looking thorns, held together by the thread of cobwebs and mold, but beside its graying leaves are bright red berries shaped like stars.
“How strange,” I say, and reach out a hand for one.
Nox wrenches me back.
“They could be poisonous,” he warns.
“I wasn’t going to eat them,” I protest.
Though just the mention of food brings a gnawing of hunger to my stomach. I haven’t eaten since this morning.
“Did you bring any food?”
“Lady Eldara didn’t exactly give me a chance to pack before she shoved me into this place.”
I groan. “I’m hungry.”
“Eat your arm, then.”
“Maybe I should cook and eat you,” I say, narrowing my eyes. “Boil your bones to make my bread.”
“Be quiet,” Nox hushes me.
I raise an eyebrow. “I was joking.”
“Shh.”
His voice turns serious.
I scoff in disbelief. “You can’t tell me to—”
Nox brings my own hand quickly across my mouth. He gestures to the bush of star-shaped fruit.
It rustles.
My eyes widen in horror and I step backward.
“Is it a ghost?” I ask in a small whisper.
“As far as I can tell, it’s a bush.”
I elbow him in the side and he grunts.
The rustling grows louder and I’m about to run for my life when a bird bursts out from the thorns, nearly the size of me.
It stares at us for a moment, cocking its bronze head. Its beak is muted gray and its eyes are like sparks of white fire.
At first I think it’s going to attack us, but it quickly opens up its golden wings and sails past us and up into the trees.
A Lamperós bird.
Just like the one the king keeps in chains back on the Floating Mountain. I thought it was the last of its kind. A lonely, dying thing.
But I was wrong because here it is. Another one, even bigger and more beautiful, its feathers unsnarled and silken.
I marvel as the great creature sweeps through the sky, weaving in and out of the stars.
“Selestra,” Nox says. “I think we should go.”
His voice is unsteady and I laugh at him.
How can the big, strong soldier be so scared of something so beautiful?
“It’s just a bird,” I say, staring up at the sky until it starts to make me dizzy.
“I’m not talking about the bird.”
A cold creeps along the lines of my spine, prickling my skin as I turn.
Sitting on one of the breathing mounds before us is a figure.
Its face is as torn as its clothes, slashes every which way, with blood crusting across its cheeks like salt. It bubbles from its mouth too, then dribbles down its chin as it watches us with blank eyes.
Its fingernails dig into the grass and the soil slithers up its arm like ants.
“How do we kill it?” I whisper to Nox.
He studies the ashen figure. “I think someone already did.”
At the sound of our voices, the figure stands.
“Run!” Nox declares.
We turn and flee in the other direction, the heavy thump of our footsteps as fast as my own heartbeat.
We don’t get far.
Neither of us sees the maze of tree-root hands, reaching up for us, until it’s too late.
We fall, tumbling down the slope of a large hill.
I roll, my head jolting back and forth until we finally splash to the bottom in a pool of mud.
It smells of the forest.
Of blood and decay.
“This is disgusting,” I say, grimacing.
I bring my hands up and they drip with rot.
Nox looks to the top of the hill, unfazed. “At least we’re not being followed by that thing,” he says. “I can’t see it anymore.”
“He probably didn’t want to roll around in the muck.” I pull myself up from the puddle. “I don’t think I’ll ever be clean again.”
Nox smirks as he tries to clean his blade on the front of his marred shirt. “I’d think your hands have been far dirtier than this before.”
I stop to stare at him. I don’t miss the pointed tone in his voice.
I climb from the puddle and wring out my hair. The murky water has turned it from green to a muddled brown.
Nox proceeds to nonchalantly pick up the compass from where it fell into the mud, ignoring my clear annoyance.
It only makes me angrier.
Over this past month, I started to think he was a noble soldier with more to him than arrogance and bravado. I started to trust him, more than I’d trusted even his father.
Now I see how wrong I was to be so foolish when he has so easily turned his back on me.
“You know what,” I say, having had enough. “I think I’m going to go prove my worth all by myself. So how about I go this way.” I gesture behind us. “And you go that way.”
I point a muddied hand in the opposite direction.
“Perfect,” Nox says. He holds the compass up and shows the pointer set hard on north. “My way is the right way.”
I glare. “Good luck lasting an hour without me.”
Nox raises his eyebrows. “I didn’t realize you had so much experience navigating haunted forests.”
I roll my eyes and take a step forward, away from Nox.
It takes me a moment to realize something is wrong.
When I go to take another step, my foot doesn’t move.
I look down and see I’m being swallowed into the ground.
The soil has turned to a gaping mouth, folding in on itself and dragging me down with it.
The forest, this living and breathing beast, is trying to devour me.
I panic and wrestle to dislodge my foot, but it only makes me sink faster. Like it enjoys my struggle, my fear whetting its appetite.
“Help me out!” I yell.
Nox stands on the edge of the unstable ground, eyeing me with an uncertain look. “I thought you were better off without me.”
“This isn’t funny,” I sneer. “Pull me up!”
“What if I get stuck too?” he says, looking far too calm in the face of my doom.
I grit my teeth. “Nox—”
“Okay, okay,” he says, and kneels on the edge of the forest mouth.
He reaches out a hand for mine and I grab it desperately.
The weight of the soil dragging me down is crushing.
It’s like I can’t breathe.
“Pull me up!” I say, frantic. “Please.”
“I’m trying,” Nox says tightly.
He lurches forward a bit and I see the moment he realizes that his grip isn’t strong enough.
“Damn it,” he curses loudly.
His hands are clasped through mine, but I can feel his hold slipping. We both can. His scowl is as prominent as the scar across his face as he tries to haul me out, but I’m already chest deep.
Our hands slip away.
Nox falls backward with a thump, my glove in his hand.
He discards it quickly and reaches for me again.
“Don’t!” I say, whipping my hand away in horror.
I can’t let him touch me.
I don’t want to see that horrible death on the beach again.
“I have to pull you out,” Nox says. He holds out his hand for mine. “Come on, Selestra.”
I shake my head. “Not like that.”
“You must give me your hand,” he presses.
I hold firm and Nox sighs, leaning back onto the soil.
“Help yourself out, then,” he says.
At first I think he’s joking, but Nox simply stares at me, waiting.
“Are you trying to be funny?” I ask. “I’m sinking!”
This forest is going to eat me whole and he’s just going to watch.
“Maybe this is part of the trial,” he says. “Try using your magic.”
“How?”
“You floated a paintbrush, didn’t you?”
I’m starting to think he’s mocking me again.
“You floated us when we jumped from the mountain, so just … float yourself out. Siphon the wind or something.”
“This is not the time for jokes!” I yell.
I’m falling deeper and deeper into this pit. The soil is licking at my stomach and up to my throat. Its teeth nip at my toes.
“I can’t save you if you won’t let me touch you,” Nox says. “You need to save yourself.”
I swallow, the crushing in my chest deepening with every moment.
The soil presses against my neck and I know within moments I’m going to disappear into the darkness.
I close my eyes.
Focus, I tell myself.
On the dirt, crumbling in, and on the shallowness of my breath.
On the feel of it all, pressing into me.
Focus.
“Come on,” Nox urges. “You can do this, Selestra. Trust yourself.”
That’s something I’ve never been able to do.
I grew up trusting Irenya and Asden, and as these weeks have drawn on, I’ve even started to put my faith in Nox. Trusting other people is so much easier than trusting myself.
I want to change that. I want to trust myself first, most.
Not last. Not least.
I search deep down for the power that Eldara claims has always been inside me. Magic that isn’t waiting for my mother to die, but waiting for me to find it.
My mother said my powers weren’t to be explored. The king said only the true Somniatis witch could have free rein of magic.
Hide it.
Push it down deep.
Be a witch, but also a shell.
Have magic, but never own it.
Don’t do what you’re not told.
Don’t learn or hope or create or wish.
Not anymore, I think to myself, and a spark bursts out from me. A flicker from inside my chest, pushing itself into the world.
I open my eyes and find that I’m free.
I hover a few steps from the mouth of the forest floor. It seems to sigh once it sees me, and when I drop down to the ground in a thump, the hole closes over, waiting for its next victim.
“You did it,” Nox says as I catch my breath.
He looks me over, eyes roaming the soil that coats my arms and legs, and then to my face, which I imagine is also covered in dirt.
His eyes crinkle in a frown.
“You’re not bleeding.”
I bring my hand to my nose, and when it comes away dry, I see that it’s true. There’s no blood.
Eldara was right: When I channel from the world, rather than myself, my magic doesn’t hurt. I’m just now realizing that it’s the opposite. I feel the wake of it thrumming through me like a series of lights blinking brighter and brighter inside me.
“Are you okay?” Nox asks.
“I’m fine.”
I’m better than fine. I feel alive, and not in the awful, tainted way I did back at the After Dusk Inn, when I nearly siphoned that man’s life.
This is different. It feels right.
“I’m glad,” Nox says.
I arch an eyebrow. “Are you?”
He shrugs. “Lady Eldara would be pretty angry if I let her niece get killed so soon.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Says the girl who nearly got eaten by a puddle.”
I laugh before I can help myself.
The tingle of magic still nips at my heart, the breeze of the wind on my bare fingers rejuvenating something deep inside me. I see my glove discarded on the ground, and I feel so free without it.
So light.
The notion of a smile creases around the corners of Nox’s mouth. I wonder if he can see it in me: the sense of a shackle being broken.
It’s as if for that moment we forget all the reasons we should be angry. We don’t think about kingdoms falling or the weight of worlds in our hands, and in that moment of forgetting we’re each someone different.
Someone impossible.
We’re who we want to be, instead of who someone else decided.
I wish it would last, but Nox jerks back and I’m lost to reality all too fast.
I sigh at him. “Are you ever going to trust me again?”
Nox’s jaw twitches at the question.
He pauses, studying me intently. I can see the debate in his eyes and it breaks me in two, cleaving me like a promise lost.
I shouldn’t care so much, but I do.
He once said he trusted me to be his queen.
“We should make camp,” Nox finally says. “Let’s look for somewhere safe to rest for the night.”
But it’s not an answer and he knows it.
He looks to the forest floor, then at the large expanse that surrounds us.
To anywhere but me.
I nod, wordless, and pick up my glove from the dirt, clenching it tightly in my hands. I trail after Nox, watching as he scours the forest for some kind of safe shelter.
I don’t take my eyes off him, even as the moon dulls and the stars begin to blink out, making way for the promise of dawn.
Will you trust me?
I want to ask again, but I don’t because I’m afraid of what the answer might be.