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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

“Y OU ARE CERTAIN this is what you want?” I stared down at the four Halflings in front of me.

Elaran twisted one of her curls through her fingers. “We’ve had the lecture three times now, Keera. Potential pain and suffering, death, and assassination.”

“Don’t forget the regret and added responsibility,” Dynara added with a smirk.

Elaran laughed but Myrrah and Fyrel straightened under my gaze.

Myrrah wheeled forward. “It would be my honor, Keera.”

“Mine too.” Fyrel nodded.

I turned to Feron.

He lifted his hand and constructed four hammocks of vines and roots. Gwyn and Vrail laid blankets and pillows on top to make them more comfortable. Feron turned to Myrrah as the others sat down in theirs. “Would you like some help?”

Myrrah raised a brow at Feron’s cane. “Not sure how much help you can offer.”

Feron smirked and two thick roots raised from the ground. One looped behind Myrrah’s knees and the other secured her back. They gently lifted her from her wheelchair and onto the hammock.

Myrrah nodded at me. “Can I have what he’s got?”

“I can’t—”

“Choose what kind of gifts you receive,” Gwyn finished for me. “She knows that, Keera. It was a jest.”

Myrrah nodded.

“Sorry.” I rubbed my brow. “I’m a little tense.”

“Then do the others first, Keera dear,” Elaran said in a singsong voice. “I want you nimble and calm when you work on me.” She winked. “That’s how you get the best results.”

I rolled my eyes. “Lay back. All of you.”

Riven stepped from the wall and grabbed my hand. “You have this, diizra ,” he whispered in my ear.

I took a deep breath, leaning into his touch. I settled there for a minute, enjoying the final moments of before I would be responsible, in part, for my friends’ fates on the battlefield.

My skin itched, my new gift already glowing at my palms. I stepped between Myrrah and Fyrel and pressed one hand to each of their foreheads, letting the magic do the work. It flowed out of me and sunk into their skin, filling their body with warm, golden light.

I let go and stepped between Dynara and Elaran. The change worked even more quickly, my magic rushing out of me like a waterfall.

“Open your eyes.”

Four pairs of amber irises glowed back at me.

Elaran stood first, checking to see if her fingers glowed like Gwyn. She looked up at me, bewildered, and blinked.

“Whoa,” Gwyn and Fyrel said at the same time.

Elaran looked back down at her hands. “What?”

“It’s not your hands,” I said. “It’s your eyes.”

They were no longer amber but gold. She looked at Feron and blinked again. This time her eyes were purple.

Vrail tilted her head. “A shapeshifter?”

Elaran matched Vrail’s mannerisms and her hair straightened and formed a long, black braid in front of our eyes. “How did I do that?” Elaran took a step back, the vein in her neck pulsing.

Feron grabbed her hand, calming her with his magic. “Do not fret. You will learn to control it as you train with me and the others.”

Elaran’s shoulders relaxed. She looked at the other new Fae, but none had shown any signs of their gifts yet. “You will help all four of us?”

Feron nodded.

“Five.” I cleared my throat. “Feron will train all five of you.”

Fyrel held up her hand, recounting the number of cots in the room.

Dynara squinted at me with her fiercely amber eyes. “What do you mean, Keera?”

“She means me.” Gerarda walked through the split grain in the wall. She lowered her hood to reveal her amber eyes.

Feron turned to me. “The council will not like this.”

“What is done is done,” Syrra said from the corner. She walked over to Gerarda and put her hand on her shoulder. “And we need every warrior we can get.”

Gerarda’s eyes fell to Syrra’s scars. “Does that mean I can get one of those?” She chewed on her lip, unable to look away as Syrra laughed.

“You must master your magic first.”

I crossed my arms. “And win a war.”

“Challenge accepted.” Shadows leaked out of Gerarda’s hands as she lifted her chin. She looked over my shoulder at Riven, who stared at the shadows like they were ghosts. “And you’re going to help me.”

“Are you certain?” I asked Syrra through the looking glass.

She swallowed. “I trust you will not cut me?”

My lip trembled as I lifted the curved shearing blade to Syrra’s shoulders. Her long black tresses hung over the back of the chair in a braid.

“You needn’t cut it all, Raava ,” Nikolai said softly, holding two bundles of his own curls in his lap. All his hair was now the same short length as the sides of his head.

Syrra’s teeth gritted together so loudly Vrail flinched. “Do it. Now.”

I took a deep breath and gathered Syrra’s thick locks together. The leather fastener could only loop around the strands twice before I had to tie it. I lifted the thin blade and held it against Syrra’s scalp.

I looked at her through the looking glass once more. She nodded. I pulled back on the blade. The Elvish steel was so sharp it left no trace of the hair behind, only bare, brown skin in the middle of Syrra’s head. I took another breath and did it again.

And again.

Seven passes was all it took to remove a warrior fully of her braid. I passed the bundle of her hair to Syrra without a word. She ran a hand across her scalp and nodded. “It is tradition that the one who cuts a mourner’s hair is the one to accompany them.” Syrra’s voice cracked, somehow turning deeper than before. “Will you do that for me today?”

My chest tightened, unbelievably touched that Syrra would ask me. “Of course, my friend,” I said in Elvish, grasping Syrra’s hand as tightly as I could. “It would be my honor.”

Syrra opened her mouth to say something, but a shadow appeared in the doorway of her burl. Nikolai’s immediate scowl told me who it was before I turned around.

Riven.

“I just came to see if anyone needed anything,” he said, staring at his boots after a quick glance at Nikolai.

Nik grabbed a canister of water from the table and hurled it at Riven’s head. Riven didn’t even duck out of the way, letting the metal crash into his chest and the water soak through his stained clothes.

“How dare you show your face here.” Nikolai’s voice was feral; there was nothing familiar in the way his mouth seemed to leak poison as he spoke. “Have you not done enough?”

The words fell to the floor of the burl like a fallen tree, smashing through the dwelling to create a line, us on one side and Riven on the other.

Riven’s neck flexed as he tried to find the words but knew there was nothing that would appease Nik. Not today.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to both of them, but Nikolai had already turned away, unable look at his best friend for a second longer than he needed to.

I wanted to run to Riven, to grab his hand and fix the fracture between us all. But he had told me to stay out of it, that he would have to find a way to do so on his own. He sulked away, bent at the middle like a soldier wounded in battle, and I let him go.

Soft drums sounded in the distance and Vrail stood from the bed. “It’s time.” She lifted her hand to Nikolai and sighed with relief when he took it.

I held out my arm to Syrra. She held her hair in one hand but looped her other arm through mine. We marched in silence toward the Myram tree where the pyre was waiting. The entire Faelinth had convened for the ceremony. They stood draped in red like the branches above us, waiting for the closest kin to arrive.

Syrra’s grip on my arm tightened as we approached the pyre. Even though she had been standing guard over her sister’s body for weeks, even though she had seen the wrappings dozens of times, there was nothing to prepare even the strongest Elf for a moment like this.

Thick tears streamed down her cheeks as she beheld her sister for the last time. Her hair was no longer singed and shorn, but frayed out in every direction with thin braids. It wasn’t braided with the living vine that Syrra had painstakingly woven into her hair after her return but with the strands of hair from every person who loved her.

I noticed the braid I had made that morning was overlaid with a thicker one. I looked up trying to find Riven in the crowd of Elverin, but he was not there. He had taken Nikolai at his word and stayed away.

Nikolai and Syrra knelt, each taking one of the strands of Maerhal’s hair that had been left for them at the center of her face. Syrra’s shoulders shook as she braided every last strand of her hair into her sister’s head—as she let Maerhal take everything she had left to grieve.

I handed her a piece of teal fabric from Maerhal’s favorite cloak to tie the braid. Nikolai finished his and gently laid it over his mother’s cheek. Her skin was untarnished, not a blemish or burn to be found. With the ghost of a smile that still clung to her lips, it was like she was asleep and not dead.

The braids along her crown were too numerous to count. Some were so tiny they appeared to be nothing more than a few strands of hair.

Nikolai walked over to Elaran, who was holding a bouquet of Maerhal’s favorite flowers. It was three times the size of the bouquets that Nikolai had left along his mother’s statue. A final gift for her to carry with her to the ancestors, so she should be forever shrouded in the scent of moonflowers. Nikolai placed the stems into her hands with rasping breaths.

My own breaths thinned as I watched him. The tears cutting into his cheeks sliced my own heart. The guilt I had been holding onto for months bubbled up as I remembered Maerhal’s final moments. Calling out to me, thinking I was her son, telling him she loved him and she was scared. I had been so sure in the comfort I gave her, so confident that I would return her home to her son in a chorus of laughter and joy.

But I hadn’t thought to clear her lungs of soot. And she’d died alone on the grass, merely a few feet away from me. She died in pain, the same way she had lived for most of her life. I would carry that mistake with me until it was my body on the pyre.

Nikolai pressed a final kiss to his mother’s forehead and backed away. Syrra pulled something small from her pocket. A doll, stitched and patched beyond recognition. A toy shared between sisters and kept for centuries even after Syrra had thought she was the only one of them left alive.

Now she truly was.

Nikolai sobbed as Syrra tucked the doll under Maerhal’s soft hands. Another token for her to carry to the ancestors until Syrra could join her there.

“May Favrel and Aydar welcome you,” Syrra whispered in Maerhal’s ear. Tears scattered across both their faces as Syrra pressed her last wish against her sister’s brow. She had to trust that her wife and child would greet Maerhal with open arms in the world to come.

Feron stepped forward with Darythir on the other side of the pyre. He cleared his throat and waited until both Nikolai and Syrra nodded. Then I raised my hands and waited for the story ritual to begin.

I had been practicing since Lash’s funeral. I had little of his mastery of fire weaving, but I could create crude images to pair along with Darythir’s story. Her hands waved through the air, slow and rounded as she tried to keep her own tears at bay. Feron’s voice boomed over the crowds as he interpreted her signs.

“The Elves were the first people of this land,” he said, his purple eyes darker than I had ever seen them. “We were not born of prayer like the Fae or of love like the Halflings. We were sculpted by Elverath herself. From her own lands she made us, from the sand on the beaches, and the earth in the mountains, and the clay in the deserts, she made a people of caretakers to watch over the land and help her magic grow.”

I painted the sky with my flames. Large mountains of smoke lured behind fiery figures emerging from the ground itself, sprouting like trees. Sweat covered my brow from the heat and the concentration, but not a tendril of flame flickered.

“Elverath granted us long lives to laugh and sing, to cry and love, but ultimately when the day came that our lives should end, the Elves must return to the earth from which they came so they can sprout again.”

Darythir’s hand lifted from the middle of her belly over her head. Behind her, my tiny seedling grew into a tree that rivaled the height of the Myram.

“The ashes of our loved ones are collected in a diizra . It is the most precious keepsake one can hold, and hold it they shall for one year. A year to grieve the one they have lost while their memory rests along their chest.”

I glanced at Myrrah. Her cheeks were red, and her hand was wrapped around her own sealed pendant that carried Hildegard’s ashes. She had followed tradition and hadn’t taken it off since the day Syrra settled the cord around her neck.

“And now we watch as our beloved is turned back into the earth she’s made from and placed into her diizra to wait for the world to come.” Darythir dropped her hands, and Feron nodded at Gerarda.

She stepped forward, dressed in the black leather chest piece that Syrra and Nikolai had made for her. Her short hair tied back in an elaborate braid with a piece cut to the scalp just above her ear.

“Ish’kavra diiz’bithir ish’kavra .” Gerarda’s voice boomed from her chest with the power of the sea, flooding the grove with its cadence as the drummers hastened their beat. It was heart-piercing melancholy, but there was a beauty to it too. Just like the Elverin’s ritual for saying goodbye. It was not without pain, but it would always end in hope and new life.

Gerarda’s funeral song came to a close. I faced Nikolai’s and Syrra’s tearstained faces. My fingers were covered in flames, but I wouldn’t light the pyre until they were ready.

Syrra’s back straightened and she gave me one stiff nod. Her dark eyes cast above the pyre, unwilling to watch it light.

I turned to Nikolai; his bottom lip quivered as he shakily nodded his head. I touched my hand to the pyre and stoked the flames until every piece of driftwood was alight.

Nikolai fell to his knees. A ghastly shriek tore through his throat, so painful I was sure his lungs were bleeding. His wails echoed through the city as the flames burned hot and Maerhal was returned to the earth once more.

Vrail knelt and wrapped her arms around Nikolai as he sobbed. I looked over at the shaking pile of limbs they had become and saw Riven standing at the back of the crowd. He was sobbing too, so silently no one else knew to turn around to witness it. But I did. I saw the guilt pouring from his face as he cried. The tall flames reflected in his jade eyes as he watched the mistake he could never fix burn away.

Dark circles hung under his eyes. I doubted he had slept an hour since the funeral was announced. I wanted to cross through the crowd and wipe his tears away, but I knew he wouldn’t let me. He would never stop trying to atone for the lives his lies had cost, and that started with making sure I was there to comfort our friends while he could not be.

I stood tall and gave him a small nod as we cried looking at each other, separated by mountains of grief and guilt. I only hoped we wouldn’t be lost in a landslide before Riven managed his way through it.

He turned and walked away as if he could hear my prayer and couldn’t bear to tell me that today would not be that day.

The entire city watched until the pyre had burned through. Feron brought a leather-bound box and placed it on a root next to Syrra. She wiped her face and opened it to reveal a small golden pouch with a metal shovel and brush. The gold chain hung from the bottom as she passed it to Nikolai. Then she brushed her sister’s ashes into the basin of the shovel and poured her remnants into the pouch.

Gerarda grabbed her blade from the fire I had left burning at the edge of the pyre and sealed the top of the pouch with the red-hot steel. It melted together, taking the shape of a closed bloom waiting for the suns to shine on it.

Feron took hold of the chain and lifted it up. His hand hung in the air, stuck between Syrra and Nikolai, unsure who should hold it for the year to come.

Sister or son.

I bit my cheek. “Can’t we make two of them?”

“No.” Syrra shook her head. “She must be whole for her tree to bloom.” The strong Elf turned to her nephew and placed a heavy hand on his shoulder. “She was your mother. It is only right that you hold her safe, Miiran.”

Nikolai pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose. He looked up at Syrra and Feron, like a lost, little boy who didn’t know what to do. “I knew her for only a few short months,” he said when his airway cleared enough. “You knew her all her life. It should be you who carries her. As you always have.”

Syrra’s mouth dipped but she nodded. Too touched to speak.

Nikolai nodded at Feron to place the gold chain around Syrra’s neck. Feron held up the diizra and Syrra bowed her head, but Nikolai rubbed his brow. “No,” he shouted, standing up from the ground. “This isn’t right.” Nikolai snatched the diizra from Feron’s grasp and ran out of the grove.

He didn’t turn back as we shouted after him. Nikolai kept moving through the groves, shouldering past worried onlookers, toward the field where his son’s tree stood over his mother’s statue.

Feron called a root from the ground and had it hoist himself into the air, using his magic to keep up with all of us.

Nikolai didn’t halt until he reached the statue. The place he had marked as the new grove of his kin. It was where he would be buried and where his mother was always meant to be.

He dropped to his knees and started to dig. Syrra grabbed his shoulder, but he shook her off, the diizra sitting safely under the stone carving of Maerhal and her toddler-aged son.

“This is not right, Miiran,” Syrra pleaded. “We are meant to wait a year to grieve before we give her back to the ancestors.”

Nikolai scowled. “I have grieved my entire life for my mother. Seven hundred years of mourning is more than enough.” Nikolai wiped his nose on his sleeve. “She spent seventy decades—seven Mortal lifetimes—in darkness. I will not have her wait one more day for peace. I do not need it, and I will not bear it.”

Nikolai’s eyes were red as he turned back to his aunt in utter desperation. Syrra ran her hand along her shorn head and nodded.

Nikolai turned to Feron, who had placed himself on the ground, though the root still hovered beside him. “Are you going to deny my mother her rest?”

Feron stood perfectly still. His pulse flared along his temple, visible from where he had cut off one of his twists to braid into Maerhal’s hair.

“Will you?” Nikolai pressed, his rage bubbling over as he threw a handful of dirt at Feron’s boots.

“No,” Feron answered hoarsely. “I will not.”

Nikolai dug the hole with his bare hands, finally getting deep enough to place the diizra at the bottom of it.

Feron lifted his hand and the earth fell back on the gold pouch. The grass sprouted through the dark earth as if Nikolai had never clawed into it at all.

“What are you doing?” I asked Feron quietly.

He nodded at the grave. “It has always been the responsibility of an earth wielder to bring our dead back to life. The magic is what causes the diizra to bloom and grow.”

I bit my lip. Maerhal had saved me as a young girl, kept my mind strong when all I wanted was to succumb to the darkness. I hadn’t been able to save her in the end, but this I could do.

“Can I?” I asked, to Feron or the others I didn’t know. I wasn’t familiar enough with our people’s customs to know whose decision this was.

Syrra turned to me and nodded. “It would be an honor for my sister to be blessed into the next life by a niinokwenar .”

My throat tightened with worry that now my idea wouldn’t work. I didn’t have the same control over earth and plants that Feron had from his countless years of practice.

I glanced at Nikolai, who nodded, leaning back against Vrail’s legs, his tears finally drying.

I knelt beside the patch of new grass, watering it with my own tears as I spanned my hand across the earth. The magic pulsed underneath me, steady and strong like a heartbeat.

Maerhal—alive once more, just in a different form.

I leaned so close to the ground that the blades of grass tickled my lips as I whispered a final goodbye to the Elf who had saved me in more ways than one.

“Biimaadizir roq waateyak miinawa, mikan.”

May you never live in darkness again, dear friend.

My magic anchored me to the ground as it penetrated the earth. Heat pulsed through my veins and into the roots that I could feel sprouting underneath me. A small silver seedling sprang from the earth, growing into a tree before our very eyes.

Within seconds, it was standing high above our heads, higher even than Davan’s tree—Nikolai’s son. The trunk was unlike anything I’d ever seen. Thin silver bark covered the thick trunk, fraying at some parts like a birch tree, but the inside was not blushed and wooden. It glowed with golden grain that spelled Maerhal’s name and all her foremothers.

Flowers sprouted from the leaves as they bore thick, round fruit wrapped in gold flesh. The blooms I recognized immediately.

Moonflowers.

Just as I had pictured. Maerhal had been given a second life as a tree that would glow bright under darkness. The light coming from the tree herself.

Nikolai stood in awe as he beheld the tree I had grown. The tree I had made. I did not need to be as well studied as Vrail or Feron to know that this was the only specimen of its kind. Though the shock on their faces confirmed it.

“Extraordinary,” Vrail whispered. She started positing questions about the magic to Feron, but I didn’t hear her.

All I heard was the rush of Nikolai’s arms wrapping around me in an embrace so tight it pushed the air from my lungs. “Thank you” was all he managed to utter, but it was enough. More than enough.

Syrra wrapped her arms around the both of us. Vrail flattened her palm against the dense bark and gasped.

“Maava?” Nikolai croaked, his eyes wide and terrified.

Syrra went rigid. Even Feron didn’t move as he stared at something behind me. I turned and my breath left my lungs. Maerhal was standing there. Her hair longer than I had ever seen it and her eyes filled with more joy than I could ever imagine.

I turned to Vrail. Her hands glowed bright where she touched the tree. “You did this?”

Vrail shrugged, her eyes as round as the suns. “I have no idea how.”

Maerhal laughed and it sounded like a song. “Elverath has watched your thirst for knowledge, your hunger for stories, Vrail. It has blessed you with a way to reclaim both.”

Nikolai took a cautious step toward his mother but didn’t touch her.

Vrail looked down at her hand that wasn’t pressed against the tree. “I can speak with the ancestors?” Excitement crinkled her eyes until they disappeared.

Syrra fell to her knees. “You’re well, sister?” she asked in Elvish.

“I am.” Maerhal smiled and nodded. “I am with our family now.” There was a small giggle and a child appeared from behind Maerhal’s legs.

A sob cracked through Syrra’s chest. “Aydar.”

The child beamed and twirled in her yellow robe.

Maerhal turned to Feron and me. “I would like to have some time with my son.” She nodded at Vrail. “Her gifts will grow, but for now we only have a short time.”

Feron nodded, and we walked out of the field together.

Tears clung to my lashes. “It’s true.” I cleared the tightness in my throat. “Once a diizra is planted, the dead join the ancestors. There is life beyond this.”

Feron nodded. “There is always an after, Keera.”

I just hoped it was happier than this.