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Something about the way he said it made her ask, “Why…?”

“Because I’d like to kiss you, and I didn’t want it to be a dream and have some idiot wake me in the middle of it.”

Seph laughed, and Alder slid his hand into her hair and captured her laugh with his mouth. She forgot all the rest, feeling as though the Fates had placed the light directly into her heart instead of giving it back to the world.

Alder did not know how long he lay tangled with Josephine upon the moss-covered floor, kissing her thoroughly, but a throat cleared, cutting it far too short.

Dammit.

“I thought you said this isn’t a dream,” Alder grumbled against Josephine’s lips.

She chuckled and pulled away, and Alder was about to pull her right back to him when he spotted the militant man standing at the exit, wearing the familiar colors of Weald and an astonishing amount of depraved blood.

Alder thought it suited his uncle nicely.

“Ah, Uncle.” Alder begrudgingly pushed himself to his elbow, though the taste of Josephine lingered on his lips. “Josephine, meet my uncle. Lord Hammerfell.”

Josephine blushed and—unfortunately—extricated herself from Alder’s arm as she stood. “It is good to finally meet you.”

“Likewise,” Lord Hammerfell replied tightly, eyeing her head to toe, as if he were comparing the figure before him to the one his mind had composed based on Alder’s description. He looked sharply at Alder. “Did you do this?” He gestured grandly at the room.

Which was when Alder realized it was drowning in foliage.

At first, Alder was confused, but then his mind caught up. He remembered how Canna had been before the curse infected them all. When their rulers had been knitted with the very land, chosen by Demas to heal it, see it flourish.

It was how Canna had been built, every city, every impressive structure.

Of course, that’d all changed when the curse descended. Whatever unique ties Canna’s rulers had been given were severed, the curse obscuring their connection, tainting it. Weakening it.

Alder remembered when he was a boy, how his mother—being tied to Weald—had the unique ability to make things grow. To heal scars, to change the landscape. To build a fortress out of rock. But once the curse arrived, she’d lost those powers, instead using everything she could just to hold it back from Weald, to keep the mist from infecting what remained.

Had the Fates granted him the power his mother and ancestors had possessed?

Even as Alder wondered, as he gazed about him in awe, he felt a rush ofeloitleave his body. The tiles cracked open and a sapling sprung out of them, growing and reaching and spreading into an alder tree with impossible speed, until it created a lush canopy over them all.

“Good gods!” Alder jumped to his feet, realizing—too late—that the coat Josephine had draped over his lower half had slipped from his body. He stood naked, and while this did not particularly embarrass him, it certainly embarrassed Josephine, and her cheeks turned a brilliant shade of red before she picked up the coat and held it out to him.

He considered refusing it, just so that he could enjoy the color upon her face a little longer, and he would have done just that if his uncle also weren’t standingright there.

“Thank you, darling,” he said instead, taking the coat and putting it on, which was when he spotted Serinbor lying upon the tiles beneath the tree, curled up with a blanket of grasses as though he were sleeping.

“Serinbor…” Alder bounded over the rubble and vines to get to his friend, silently praying he only slept. That Serinbor lived.

Alder dropped to his knees beside him. Dried blood caked Serinbor’s brow, and a dark patch stained his vest, and Alder pleaded to every god he could think of as he checked Serinbor’s pulse.

“Oh, thank the Fates…” Alder heaved his relief, now checking for any point of injury or obstruction.

“He’s alive?” Josephine asked with surprise, crouching beside him.

“Yes, his pulse is faint, but if we could just…” Alder considered all the foliage, and the new power he’d been granted.Eloitpractically hummed beneath his skin, impatient to be used. Alder didn’t doubt his body would adjust to it in time, that theeloitwould eventually calm to something more reasonable, but for now…

Alder placed a hand over Serinbor’s brow, closed his eyes, and murmured a word of transference. Something that would press some of Alder’s overly-abundanteloitinto Serinbor, as he’d done for Josephine’s burn, but Alder’s power was so potent, he’d barely finished speaking before Serinbor’s body spasmed with a fit of coughing.

Alder could have cried with relief.

Serinbor’s eyes opened as Alder helped him sit, helped extract all the vines that had tangled themselves with Serinbor’s arms and legs. And when Serinbor finally ceased coughing, he glanced about him, at this glorious arboretum. His gaze trailed the alder tree’s branches, down its massive trunk and then settled—and narrowed—on Alder himself.

“Dammit, Alder. Why do you always have to be such a showoff?”