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.”