Page 48 of Ascendant King

“Do you smell that?” one of them asked.

“I don’t smell anything except your farts.” The other wolf rolled his eyes. “It’s probably just the dryads messing with us.”

“They wouldn’t dare.” One of the others snickered. “We know how lighter fluid works.”

They headed away from me, and I relaxed into the ground, keeping myself hidden until they were out of sight. As I lay there, considering my options, a vine wrapped itself around my paw.

I jerked the leg back, and the vine immediately released. The surrounding greenery rustled, leaves shaking, plants moving.

The part of me that still remembered the nightmare stories, the stories as old as the oldest pack, made my heart beat so fast my vision blurred for a second. I shook my head sharply, growling under my breath.

Then I ran, not caring about the noise I made. I had to get back to Cade. If the dryads had found us and they weren’t friendly, we needed to enact our attack plan.

When I leapt over a fallen log, arriving back with our group, Cade and Nia were busy glaring at each other.

“—going.” Cade’s voice was soft but sharp.

I blinked. He’d never challenged me in public, but here he was, pushing Nia’s authority in front of strangers. Maybe it was that he was used to her as a consort, her being considered beneath him, even if Rhys would never think that.

But when he looked at me, his face relaxed, the lines around his eyes disappearing. His lips parted for a second, and I couldn’t smell him at all.

He was using that magic again, the spell that hid his feelings from anyone with the nose to smell them.

When I shifted back, I said quickly, “The dryads have found us. We need to be ready.”

Nia slid away, moving to a guard position just next to Cade. No matter how angry she was with him right now, she wasclearly still going to protect him. Cade tossed me my clothes, his eyes scanning over me.

Around us, the trees shivered, green sprouts grew rapidly, surrounding us with thick grass. When I pulled my head through my shirt, the trees were growing thicker. By the time I pulled on my pants and shoes, they trapped us.

Before, we had been able to pick a path through them and tell our way forward. Now, I could barely make out any light between the trunks.

They grew so close together that the wood around us darkened. Then, we were entirely encircled. No light, no way to get through the trunks packed so tightly together that they looked like one enormous tree encircling us.

Cade raised a hand, swarming tattoos crawling over every inch of his palm, twisting in on themselves, violence contained in his fist.

A face formed in the trunk of one of the trees.

“Miles. Prince Bartlett. You have returned. The elder would speak with you.” The face disappeared, and the trees parted, disappearing in front of us to create an open path, wide enough to be a road, leading straight ahead.

“We aren’t taking that path, are we?” The Pineridge Springs member spoke finally, his voice deep.

“We’ve been invited to a meeting by the dryads.” I squinted, trying to see where the road led. Thick layers of grass grew on either side, an inviting green path leading us toward something. “It would be rude to refuse.”

With a final glance at Cade, I turned and began walking.

Chapter

Sixteen

Either we were closer than we’d expected to the village, or the dryads used magic to move us because we hadn’t been walking for more than ten minutes before we heard voices, then saw the first hints of civilization.

When the dryads had described their town to me, I hadn’t been sure what to imagine. Part of me had pictured a rural trailer park or something from the Middle Ages—all thatched roofs and livestock in the street.

Instead, we approached what looked like a Hallmark Christmas movie. The street was surrounded by buildings out of Stars Hollow but with more shaped wood, as though the dryads had helped people build by simply growing a tree in the correct shape.

“Where are we?” Three Lakes West asked.

“The dryads live here,” I said. People were beginning to come out of the buildings, and when I looked past the picturesque buildings, I could see the town was surrounded by the same thickly grown woods that had led us here. Nothing could get past a wall like that to attack the town.