Chapter Fifty-Three

The air in the Conservatory always smelled of dirt. Of mist, of leaves. Of earth.

Dazzling sunlight filtered through the arched glass panes high, high above, bathing the hundreds of rows of plant life in all its radiant glory. Iridescent dragonflies and other insects zipped past. Birds with wings so vibrant they seemed dipped in oil paint darted overhead. The Conservatory knew their songs like the sea knew the sound of gulls. All day, the birds warbled and trilled and shrieked at one another, calling and answering, a symphony of a thousand counterpoints.

Queen Valeria ambled down the aisles of the Conservatory with her teenage brother, Prince Viyo, at her side. The prince was as sullen as usual, dragging his feet along the gravel and kicking a round rock ahead of them every few strides.

Whap! The rock skittered ahead. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Viyo’s sandals against the gravel. Whap!

Elsewhere, Valeria might have scolded him, but simply basking in the Conservatory’s finely tuned ecosphere gave her the patience to tolerate his childish antics. Besides, no one was around to witness them, since at her own request the entire space was always empty of visitors and upkeepers in the morning.

She paused in front of a bright little cluster of plumeria flowers, their charming teardrop-shaped petals shaded fuchsia at the tips and then fading saffron toward their centers. A few buds had yet to blossom.

“Here, Viyo,” she commanded.

Her brother made a face but complied, though not before jogging ahead to pick up the rock he had been kicking.

“Immortals,” Valeria exclaimed. “That was your affinity stone?”

“That was your affinity stone?” Viyo parroted in a high-pitched voice and thrust his hand toward the buds. They bloomed as he inhaled, the petals unfolding gracefully.

Valeria inspected the blossoms and hummed in satisfaction. “You do realize that my voice is deeper than yours, small child?”

“That was your affinity stone?” Viyo repeated in the deepest tone he could muster, but his voice cracked on the last word. He flushed angrily when Valeria threw her head back with laughter. “I’m sixteen!”

Valeria smirked. “Still small, still a child.” She raised her hand toward the next aisle, where a sequoia sapling poked out of an empty plot of dirt. Then she braced herself and pulled. Its tiny green sprigs exploded outward, chasing height faster than steam rising, its trunk swelling and its boughs bursting with needles. The taller it grew, the faster it grew, and in less than a minute, it had shot two hundred feet into the sky with a trunk twenty feet thick and cones that brushed the ceiling.

The Conservatory was a magical place, to say the least.

Viyo folded his arms across his chest. “You don’t intimidate me,” he informed her, very unconvincingly.

Valeria sighed. “You miss my point, small child. At the end of the day, even the tiniest of saplings can grow to be the mightiest of them all.”

That drew a reluctant smile from him. “You’re like a walking fairy tale, oh wise and elderly sister.” And with that, he dropped his affinity stone back onto the ground and resumed kicking it around.

“Elderly?” Valeria demanded. “I am still in my mid-ish twenties! By the time you—”

SCREECH!

Viyo yelped and clapped his hands over his ears. The deafening fwumph of thousands of wingbeats exploded through the air. The birds scattered and surged up to the top of Valeria’s sequoia, huddling together for safety upon its towering branches.

“Viyo! My chambers, now!” Valeria ordered, already shoving her little brother into a stumbling run.

“But my affinity stone—”

“Now, I said!”

Thankfully, the prince had the good sense to obey, sprinting for the exit closest to the royal wing. Valeria kept right on his heels, flying over the gravel. They passed the humongous statue of Lady Siore, the Goddess of Earth, with her kind, gentle face and her antler crown of branches and blossoms curving from her brow. Stone stags grazed upon the slopes of her palms and their horns clashed atop her shoulders.

The goddess’s eyes, normally closed in serenity, were wide open.

Less than a moment before they made it through the doors, the earth shook. It shook, like thunder incarnate. They both tumbled forward, but Valeria managed to command the gravel to rise up and catch their fall.

As soon as they passed through the exit, the ground stilled beneath their feet even as the Conservatory continued to tremble.

“Go,” Valeria told her brother, already turning back to the Conservatory. “I’ll meet you there.”

“What? Where are you going?” Viyo cried, but she merely glared at him over her shoulder until he ran away.

Valeria waited until the prince was safely out of range before she plunged back into the Conservatory. With her earthstone locked in her grip, she stretched her arms out. The gravel shuddered to life and carried her forth upon a never-ending wave. When the ground quaked too violently for her to keep her footing, she called upon vines to secure her balance and propel her forward.

The statue of Lady Siore loomed above her. Just the slightest trace of a fissure crept along the goddess’s left shin—a shortcut to the gateway.

“Ovrire fera Valeria Iyala,” Valeria roared above the rumbling of the earth. The stone groaned outward, a wound tearing open. She leapt through and slid down a descending spiral overgrown with slippery moss.

A cavern of stark white rock opened around the spiral. This was the entrance to a gateway connecting the two realms—right here, right beneath the Conservatory. She had only witnessed the gateway opening once—many, many years ago.

The walls shook and rained down dust from the force of the gateway’s power. Valeria’s eyes widened as the air began to churn and a white vortex formed in the exact center of the cavern above her head. She made it to the bottom of the spiral just in time to see three figures sail out of the vortex. Two young men, one blond and the other dark-haired, and a majestic, feathered demon with wings for arms.

Valeria’s eyes narrowed.

She knew one of those young men.

The blond one. He was Axarian. She’d seen him most recently at the Fairfest Eve Ball. He was the Imperial Guardian of the Queen of Axaria, or something like that. Now, the Queen of Axaria was an entirely different dilemma all on her own—Valeria had already sent her four urgent letters without a single response—but . . . what in hell had her Guardian been up to in the Immortal Realm?

The winged demon snatched up the two men by their collars. A shadow danced along the walls, and in the mere moment that Valeria took to frown at it before returning her attention to the strange trio, they had already vanished into nothingness.

The gateway, too, swallowed itself in one self-destructive gulp, waiting for whoever would seek it out next.

Valeria glowered at the now-empty cavern.

What madness.

And then she began shouting for the Goddess of Earth at the top of her lungs.