I turn my head, and there is Kartik, bare-chested, walking toward me. I take his face into my hands, kissing him hard and recklessly. I want to crawl inside his skin. This magic is nothing like the magic we have played with before. It is raw and urgent, with no facade to hide behind. This is what they don’t want us to feel, to know.
“Kiss me,” I whisper.
He presses me against the tree; his lips are on mine. Our hands are everywhere. I want to lose myself to this magic. No body. No self. No concerns. Never to be hurt again.
The Tree of All Souls speaks inside me. “And would you have more?”
For a moment, the Temple magic fights within me. I see myself standing before the tree while Kartik screams my name, and I feel as if I’m struggling to wake from a laudanum dream.
“Yes,” someone answers, and it isn’t me. I struggle to see who has answered so, but the tree’s branches hold me fast. It holds me like a mother and coos as softly.
“Sleep, sleep, sleep…”
I fall through the floors of myself, waiting for someone to catch me, but no one does, so I just keep falling into a dark that never ends.
Later—I cannot say when, for time has lost all meaning—I hear a voice telling us it is time to go. I am suddenly aware of the cold. My teeth chatter. There is frost on my friends’ eyelashes. Without a word, we turn from the tree and stumble back the way we came. We pass the bodies hanging from the trees like ghoulish chimes, their entreaties whispered on the wind: “Help us….”
The rest of the journey out of the Winterlands is a dream of which I remember little. My arms are scratched, and I cannot recall how they have come to be this way. My lips are bruised, and I wet them with my tongue, feeling small cracks in the skin. When we step across the mist-shrouded threshold of the Borderlands, I ache with a desire to turn back. The strange twilight beauty of the Borderlands no longer excites. I can feel it in the others as well, can see it in their backward glances. We step over the vines that slither from the Winterlands. They stretch their arms, reaching closer and closer to the castle.
Bessie speaks as if in a daze. “It’s like it knew me. Really knew me. I saw m’self and I were a proper lady—not pretend, but respected.”
“No fear,” Felicity murmurs, stretching her arms overhead. “No lies.”
Pippa twirls around, faster and faster, till she falls down laughing. “It all makes sense now. I understand everything.”
Gorgon is waiting for us in the river. I try to avoid her, but she sees me slipping behind a tall wall of flowers.
“Most High, I have been looking for you.”
“Well, you have found me, it seems.”
Her eyes narrow, and I wonder if she can smell the forbidden on my skin like another’s sweat. The other girls run wild. They wear a new fierceness that brings a gleam to their eyes and a flush to their cheeks. Felicity laughs and it sounds like a call to arms. I want to go to them, to relive our experience in the Winterlands, not suffer under the watchful eye of Gorgon.
“What is it?” I call.
“Come closer,” that syrupy voice demands.
I stand on the grass a good ten feet from where Gorgon sits on the river. She turns her head and takes in the sight of me—hair a ruin, arms scratched, skirt torn. The snakes dance hypnotically. “You have been, I see,” Gorgon says.
“And what if I have?” I answer, defiant. “I had to see for myself, Gorgon. How could I possibly govern without knowing? The Tree of All Souls exists, and its power is immense!”
The snakes round her face writhe and hiss. “Promise me you will not return to that place until you have made the alliance. Most High, your power—”
“Is that all I am—the magic? No one sees who I am. They see what they want to see, what I can do for them. Who I am, how I feel doesn’t matter a bloody bit!” I’ve started to cry, which I hate. I turn my head away till the tears subside, and when I face Gorgon again, I am a different girl, one who will not be told what to do or where to go.
“You may go now, Gorgon. Our conversation has ended.”
For once the proud warrior seems unsure, and I’m glad of it. “Most High…”
“Our conversation has ended,” I repeat. “If I want to speak with you, I shall find you.”
On the grass, a merry game has sprung up. Felicity pushes Bessie, who pushes back harder.
“Ye can’t best me,” Bessie taunts. Her eyes glimmer.
Felicity’s laugh is brittle as weeds. “I already have, or hadn’t you noticed?”