“May Zori have mercy on us.”

I bump the water skin in my hand against Gate’s as if we’re drinking wine at a wedding, rather than pouring oily, possibly cursed water down our throats. He takes a mouthful first, as agreed, and I watch apprehensively. When he doesn’t gag or fall over, clawing at his throat, I drink from my skin.

The water doesn’t taste of poison or filth, but it’s not sweet either. There’s a staleness to it, with a sickly aftertaste. Neev stands several paces away, watching us with a cagey expression.

“Aren’t you thirsty?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “One of us should abstain. In case the other two...”

“But what will you drink?”

“I hoarded my water. I had less of a load to carry than you, and I need less. Because of my power.”

Gate gulps another mouthful of water and pulls a face of disgust. “It tastes like the air in a tomb.” He caps his canteen and removes a whetstone from his pocket.

“You know,” I say cautiously, “the other morning I started to drink, and I swore my waterskin was lighter than the night before.”

“You probably took a drink in the middle of the night and forgot.” Gate swipes the whetstone down the length of his dagger. “The other skin bursting was just a stroke of bad luck. Not the first we’ve had on this journey.”

I shoot him a perturbed look. That’s just the response I imagined when I debated telling them about it. “I’d remember if I had,” I say, trying not to sound testy. He shrugs.

We keep to the path, but some hours into the day—I don’t know when, for I’ve lost all sense of time without the movement of the sun—I hear something crying a little way off in the trees. The voice of caution in the back of my head tells me not to look for the source, but there’s a strange disconnect between logic and action in my mind now. I pause, peering between the tree trunks. They glisten wet-black like obsidian. There’s stillness, and then I glimpse something flitting between two trees and see a flash of white wings.

“Dette!”

Since I drank the lake’s water, I’ve struggled to even remember why I’m here. But now I remember. Dette. I’m going to Cliff Sedge to ask for help to save her. Fearing I’ll lose sight of her if I stop to call the others, I step off the path into the frozen bracken, crunching through dead leaves. When I’ve gone several paces, I hear the sound again, right behind me. Every time I draw close to the tree it seems to come from, it moves.

I run after her, losing and regaining ground, losing all sense of direction. I catch up to her in a small clearing crusted with hoarfrost. When I see her clearly, I realize my mistake. The person I’ve been chasing isn’t Dette at all. They’re a small sylph, crouched over and dressed in finery turned to tatters. I can see why I mistook her for Dette, though. She has white wings and stands about Dette’s height. But her eyes are dark and large with hunger and sorrow, and her hair is lichen and feathers, not black ringlets like Dette’s.

Sylphs often have wings, but hers are stunted and molting, and one twitches and drags on the forest floor like the broken wing of an injured bird.

As I approach, she starts singing a tune with a haunting melody.

Come and eat

Come and eat

Berries and apples

Compote and trifle

Crumbling and savory

Warm and sweet

Come and eat

Come and eat

I recognize it as a snippet of a feast ode sung by the sylphs at summer’s end. Dette used to sing it at dinners on Lebed in her clear, lilting voice.

“Are you alright?” I ask her softly. “You’re a long way from the realm of your folk.”

“What are you?” Her voice is a throaty tremble.

“My name is Thedra. I’m an elemental, and princess of Lazul.”

She blinks, studying me with an air of confusion, like a sleepwalker. “Can you help me?” she says at last.

“Yes. I’m going to Shoreana. Let me take you there.”

“No!” she hisses. “Not there.” She reaches for my wrist and grasps it, her grip surprisingly sure. Her hand is like a bird of prey’s claw, bony and grasping with sharp pearlescent talons. “Help,” she says again.

She forces my arm down until my hand is just a few inches from my hip. “You’re a lightning elemental,” she says. “Strike me.”

I manage to twist my arm out of her grip, unclip my diamond vial from my belt, and move out of her reach, keeping the vial snug in the palm of my hand. “Why would I do that?”

“The forest got inside me, and I’m...” She retches, and I expect something horrible to come out of her mouth, but she emits a shrill wheezing cry instead, like a grackle startled from its hiding spot in a clump of fern. “Poison and rot. Quick.” Her eyes dart to the edge of the clearing. “Do it before he comes back!”

A chill runs down my spine. “Before who comes back?”

“The mage. He brings evil, but you have power.” She points to my diamond vial.

“The mage?”

“Yes. The Gaunt Man.”

The Gaunt Man. I shudder at the strange name. She reaches for me again, and I side-step her. “Stop! Let me take you to the air folk. They have healers.”

Her face changes, distorting into the stubborn scowl of a child denied a plaything. She lunges again, and this time she connects with my arm, her claws sinking through the fabric of my sleeve, deep into my flesh. They’re like finely sharpened bone, and she drags them down my arm to my wrist. I gasp in pain, releasing the vial, and before I can stop her, she snatches it and uncorks the stopper, upending it into her mouth as if it’s a dose of medicine.

I scream and try to grab her, but it’s too late. Strands of energy unravel from her mouth like living threads and creep down her body, sparkling in a blue-white web of electricity. I dare not touch her now, even though the magic is mine. Light pours from her mouth and eyes and her every pore until she is lit up from the inside out.

I turn and run when I realize what’s going to happen. I’m thrown to the ground as she implodes and shatters into a million pieces, like a fragile vase dropped on a marble floor.

I stay curled in a ball with my face in my hands, incandescent spots hovering behind my eyelids. When I can see again, nothing is left but a black spot on the forest floor that stretches outward in a starburst of sharp points. Crawling to it on my knees, I find my diamond vial in the center, unharmed. I retrieve it and snap my fingers, and my lightning funnels into its cage like a glittering tornado. I replace the cork and examine the vial. Its contents are no longer blue, white, and purple. There’s a greenish tinge to them now, as if my lightning absorbed the sylph’s essence.

I don’t understand why she did this. Why she refused my offer to help her. I manage to take a bandage from my pack and wrap my arm, beyond caring if I do a thorough job. I stay on the ground until my legs are numb and the gashes on my arm sting, cutting through my reverie.

When I hear footsteps, I think Agate and Neev have found me, but then I see a pair of boots and the edge of a dark cloak.

A man is standing in the clearing. I tense like a rabbit caught in the gaze of a lynx.

“You look sick,” he says, his tone concerned. “And you’re bleeding. Did that creature hurt you?”

“She wasn’t a creature. She was a sylph.” I struggle to my feet, keeping my hand at my hip, near my vial. My arm throbs and blood soaks through the makeshift bandage.

“You should never have come here,” he says. “The grief growing here will destroy you.”

A terrible suspicion is forming in the back of my mind, cutting through my exhaustion, confusion, and pain. “Who are you?”

He tilts his head and then makes me a low bow. “Your Highness,” he says. “Don’t you know me?”

I know his voice. I’ve heard it echo across the cobblestones of the courtyard, heard its rich timbre over the laughter of children when he performed magic in the great hall, before I had magic myself.

I’ve heard it call my mother’s name.

“You.”

Rothbart comes closer and lowers his hood, revealing his dark eyes and hollow cheeks. The Gaunt Man, the sylph girl said.

My thumb hovers over the stopper of my vial. His eyes flicker, following the movement of my hand before returning to my face.

“I wouldn’t do that, Thedramora. The forest has weakened you.”

I stare at him in disbelief. “What’s wrong with this place? With me? What did you mean when you said there was grief growing here?”

His dark eyes dart to mine, and I glimpse something in them. Something cold and calculating that leaps out before he can suppress it. “I’m not sure. But I think perhaps all the twisted things wrought in this forest from your mother’s magic are killing you.”

“Her magic?” I sound like an idiot, chatting with him beneath the trees like this, but my head is muddled by pain and shock, and I can’t think straight.

“Yes.” He looks around us at the dying trees, his expression more musing than anything. “This forest is millennia old and has its own ancient magic running through the root systems of the trees. Nothing I transfigured here with Mora’s power came out as it should. And then it grew out of control. This toadstool, for instance.” He stoops to pluck a mushroom from the loam, and I watch, transfixed. “See the little mutant ones growing from the cap? This variety used to be edible, but if you tried to eat the duplicates, they’d be toxic.” He drops the toadstool and brushes his hand across his thigh.

Blinding rage erupts inside me, temporarily blotting out my pain. My mother’s radiant power, the terrifying beauty of her transfiguration into the war bird that could pierce a giant’s eyes, snap off a man’s head in a blink. Her years of study in the temple of the dead; all this, mined for mad experiments in a forest?

“You killed her?”

“She died,” he says, as if correcting me.

I stagger toward him, and he sidesteps me deftly.

“How?” I don’t want to know the answer, but I can’t stop myself from asking. “They found only ash and a few feathers in the palace and they thought she’d combusted. A spell gone wrong."

"A feather and some ash? That wasn’t Mora. That was just our first failed attempt. I took her with me. This—” He gestures widely at the forest. “—is Mora. I buried her body among the roots of a great ash that grew into the root systems of all the other trees centuries ago.”

I think about the cloying smell of rot pervading the forest, the decaying apples, the pollen I thought was mold, the strange grotesques. “What did you do to her?”

“She wanted to share her power with me, but it went wrong.”

I speak through clenched teeth, clutching my vial so hard the beveled edges cut into my hand. “Went wrong how?”

He licks his lips. “Once, when we first met, I complimented her flawless transfiguration. And she said, ‘I’d share it, if I could. But it can’t be taught except to those with the talent.’ All those hours we spent in my lair, trying to find a way to transfer elemental power to a regular mortal... She wanted it, too.”

I’m shaking, and I open my vial even though I know I shouldn’t. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I am too weak to use my magic. I can barely grasp its static crackle. An elemental’s power is only as strong as they are. But I don’t care. I snap my fingers without another thought, pointing to him. A lightning branch leaps obediently, but my wounded arm makes me miss, and it strikes the ground near his boot instead of my target. My eyes are dazzled, and Rothbart throws up an arm to shield his face. I advance on him, snapping again, but he extends his palm and sends my lightning back at me. It hits me, but I absorb it as I learned to do in training, letting it strengthen me.

The next time I try to strike him, he puts both hands over his head and brings them around in the shape of a sphere, and the lightning spreads into a shield in a sparkling web.

He smiles at me through the glittering dome. “Your power has grown since you were a child, Thedra. But so has mine.”

The electricity spins and swirls in a blinding white column as it flows from my hands, spreading like the roots of a tree as it hits the shield. My strength begins to waver as I funnel all my power toward him. “Are you the one who took Dette?”

My arms tremble and I pant from exertion, but I keep forcing my lightning toward him.

“Forget Dette,” he says, still resisting me easily. A non-powered mortal shouldn’t be able to resist the full force of my power like this. Not even a skilled magician like Rothbart. I hoped he was bluffing, but it’s clear he wasn’t.

“Go home,” he continues. “Back to Thede’s sad little kingdom where you belong. Mora loved you. She wouldn’t want you to die here.”

The raw, open cuts on my arm are sizzling with electricity now. They sting like fresh burns and my eyes water. “What have you...done with Dette?”

“I’ve made good use of her.”

“Is she still alive?”

He smiles at me like he has a secret he can hardly bear to keep. “She is. Have you forgotten she has the power to heal?”

I surge forward, forcing him back a step. “I will find her.”

He laughs. “Perhaps. But make sure you shore your defenses ere we meet again.”

With a thrust of his hands, he pushes me with his magic, taking back the ground he lost. Then he shoves me backward with the invisible shield like a knight staving off a swordsman. I stumble, and Rothbart vanishes. What energy I had left drains out of me in his wake, and the clearing goes blessedly dark.

I lie unconscious until Agate and Neev find me and shake me awake.

“What happened?” demands Agate. “Why did you leave us?”

“I followed something.”

Neev is crouched beside me, looking worried. “Are you hurt?”

I nod listlessly, and she looks at Agate. “She’s bleeding.”

“Will you give me a dream, Gate? Like the one by the fire that night? But gentler. Something warm and...” I can’t say any more. My throat aches; I don’t want to cry in front of him. That’s no behavior for a future queen. My mother would never have cried before an undercaptain.

“Yes,” he says, his voice kinder than before. “I’ll give you a dream. But we have to return to the path first, if we can find it.”

“You wandered quite a distance,” explains Neev. “One minute you were there and the next, gone. It’s lucky Agate is such a good tracker.”

I can’t stop shaking and she scans my face, looking worried. “What happened?”

Through jarring teeth, I stutter, “S-sylph girl...killed herself with my power. And I saw him.”

“Saw who?”

“Rothbart.”

Her brow furrows and her gaze darts to Gate, who is inspecting my cuts. He pours water from his skin onto my arm to wash away the blood and I try to jerk my arm free of his grasp.

“Please,” I beg, “not that water.”

“Help me hold her,” he says to Neev, his voice tense.

They clean the cuts with the water from the lake despite my struggles and Agate stitches the deepest wounds with sutures from his pack. Neev smears them with some sort of pungent ointment and wraps my arm in a strip of linen. The wound aches and stings, no matter what position I hold my arm in.

When we stop to make camp for the night, I hear them talking about me. “She’s in shock,” whispers Neev. “She thinks she saw the sorcerer. The one who stole Dette.”

“I think she’s hallucinating from the water.”

“But you’re not hallucinating,” says Neev, a hint of suspicion in her tone.

Gate’s tone is quarrelsome. “No, but I’m not injured either. I wish you two hadn’t forced me into coming to this goddess-forsaken forest. I hate it.”

He continues to grouse, but he puts me to sleep as promised, with a dream about sleeping on a soft pallet in a sylphan platform in the treetops. It feels like the height of summer—stars sparkle overhead, crickets chirp, and I can smell honeyed mead and ambrosia. But a chill wind makes me shiver and there’s a gnawing dread in the back of my mind—the sky isn’t a sky at all, I think, but a shroud, and the stars are the glowing pinpricks of many waiting eyes.

My arm is worse when I wake up. It feels like the scratches have festered under the stitches, and it hurts so much I can barely stand up straight. I can’t stop thinking about the sylph girl. I hate myself for letting her die. It was weak to let her take my vial just because she attacked me. She clearly wasn’t in her right mind.

Nor will you be, by the end, says the nagging voice in my head. You will never leave Thornewood, just like her. Like your mother.

Disjointed thoughts flit through my mind. Fuck, what did he do to her? How long did she suffer? Why did he admit to killing her? He must pay for what he’s done.

When we stop to rest and drink water, I peel back the bandage on my arm. Green pus oozes from the slashes, which are crusted with black scabs.

“How’s it feel?” asks Gate.

I tuck the bandage back in place before he can see it. “Fine, I guess,” I say shakily. “Sore.”

“We should go. If you’re too tired to walk, we can carry you.”

I give him a disgusted look. “I can walk.”

I trudge after him and Neev. When I drink from my water skin my tongue tastes of copper, and my ears ring until my skull is buzzing like a hive of angry bees.

After Neev and Agate have left me behind half a dozen times, they take turns letting me lean on them to walk. “Make them stop,” I say to Neev at some point.

“Make who stop?”

“The voices. They won’t stop jabbering in my ears.”

Neev looks frightened. “Thedra...the only one speaking is you. You’ve been whispering about—

“Don’t,” Gate cuts her off. “Telling her won’t make any difference.”

“Telling me what? What are you hiding from me?”

“Nothing.”

I pull my arm from the warm crook of Neev’s elbow. “I don’t want to walk anymore. Let me lie down. I wish we were back in that sunny hollow.”

“Thedra, we have to get you to the sylphs,” pleads Neev. “You’re not well.”

When I look at her and Gate now, I hardly recognize them. Their faces are the same, but my mind won’t confirm who they are. They look hazy, like the face of a dead loved one in a dream. Like the sylph girl, and the way I thought she was Dette at first. Was she even real? Or just another one of my nightmares taking form? I’m realizing nothing in this forest is what it seems.

My arm throbs beneath the bandages, and I stop in the middle of the path and sink to my knees, my fingers grasping at the dirt. My skull throbs like it’s going to burst into a thousand pieces. I’ve never wanted anything more than I want to lay my head on the mossy ground and never pick it up again.

The next time I’m aware of my surroundings, Gate is carrying me, grunting and panting from my weight. I’m not petite like Neev—I have a good appetite and muscles from riding and wielding. He’ll lord this over me later.

We stop for the night, and Gate lays me down beside the campfire they’ve started, but I can’t stop trembling.

They bring me food, but my teeth are chattering too violently to eat, and I roll onto my side. Neev lies down beside me and I clutch at her hands, shivering even more from her warmth. Sweat trickles from her forehead even though I’m eaten up by chills. “Help me,” I beg her. “Tell Gate to help me. It’s inside me, inside my head.”

“What is?”

“The forest,” I say, as if she should know what I’m talking about, but I’m nattering like a lunatic. “She said it was inside her, and now it’s inside me. And he was waiting for me...”

“Thedra, there was no one else there when we found you. You’re ill.”

I don’t answer her. The mage, I want to say, but they don’t believe me, and suddenly I can’t remember his name. The scratches on my arm are flames licking across my skin and I snatch my sleeve up and claw at the bandage, tearing it off to show them my festered arm. “See? It’s poison. It’s all poison.”

Her eyes go huge at the sight of my oozing arm, and she gets up. I can hear her talking to Gate as if from a far distance.

“We’ve got to get her to the healers. Her arm is infected.”

I think I see them leering at me. They’re talking about me behind my back. Saying I’m mad. That I’ve led them on a useless quest through a deadly forest that will kill us all.

I close my eyes so I can’t see them anymore, until Neev’s gloved hand lands on my shoulder. She handles my arm gingerly, but even a light touch feels horrible. I groan as she bathes the scratches with an herb tincture. She salves and re-bandages them, but my fever doesn’t go away. My arm still pulses with agony, and my head pounds.

“I’m so sorry, Thedra,” Neev whispers. I don’t have the strength to tell her it’s not her fault, but when she asks, “Shall I say a prayer for you?” I nod feebly.

“Tell me which goddess. Zori?”

I shake my head. “Not Zori. I told her to fuck off.”

I hear a smile in Neev’s voice as she says, “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. I’ll pray to Thorne for you, then. She’s a robust goddess, full of healing growth. Perhaps she has some to spare.”

I nod, unable to form a reply. Despite my blasphemy, I whisper a prayer of my own, anyway. Zori, please. I’m so sick. Help me.

But Zori doesn’t come. Her body is in her tomb in Lazul, her spirit in the next-world. Why would she come to me now?

At last, I give myself up to the darkness, my consciousness ebbing.

When I come to, green tendrils have curled about my wrists and ankles, rooting me to the ground. They’re growing from beneath the feet of a woman standing nearby. When she kneels beside me in the loam, I realize she’s not human.

Her body is woman-shaped, with a round, soft belly and wide hips, and she has the dark, dark skin of a Zelener, but her eyes are the large, gentle brown of a rabbit’s, and stag horns sprout from her head. There are feathers at her wrists, her nails are sharp and pearlescent, and beneath her flaxen robes her chest is covered in a fan of iridescent lizard scales.

“Thorne?”

“Some have called me by that name,” she says, taking my hand. “But you don’t have to.”

“Are you here to end my suffering?”

She looks amused by this dramatic question. “Not the way you think. Have you come to stay the hand of the one who changed my forest?”

I shake my head. “I tried to. He said grief was growing here. That it would kill me. And he was right. Zori said I stink of it.”

Her hand roves over the deep scratches on my forearm, making me hiss in pain. “Lies. What is grief? An aching scar where a limb once was. But you are not defined by what you have lost, Thedra of Lazul.”

But I am, I want to say. It clings to me like a demon. Spreads like gangrene. Grief is the thing following me through the forest, skulking and scrambling beneath the trees like a pale, bloated spider.

When I met Zori, I felt nothing but cold. But the power coming from Thorne pulses like the heat in a summer meadow. I want to clasp her to my breast and absorb it, drink it up. But it’s not mine to take.

As if she has read my mind, she says, “Let me help you.”

I only stare at her. I’m sworn to Zori. How can a consort of death be healed by a goddess of life?

Her patient brown eyes search my face. “When Lazulians pay me tribute, they usually do it with the bones of animals, or with spilled blood. Because Zori craves those things. But you left me an object of devotion. You are more than loss and death. You must meet Zori again one day, as all mortals do. But Thornewood is my domain, and I grant you relief.”

With that, she squeezes my arm until stinging tears come to my eyes. My chest heaves and I sob huge, choking sobs. Something sharp and rough snakes up my arm and pierces the flesh, funneling and unfurling inside me. Green sap seeps from the wound in my arm, and vines sprout from my eyes and nose and curl around my organs and bones until they burst and splinter.

When I open my mouth to scream, Thorne murmurs, “That’s it, out with it,” and the vines climb up my throat, crowding it with leaves and blocking out my cries. Black, rotted bile spills out of my mouth and seeps into the ground. I lie still, a hollowed-out shell that used to be a girl. I am one with Thornewood at last.