Page 74 of Raven's Dawn
Laila shot me a look.
“Sorry,” I muttered.
“They are as you believe them to be,” the tree said. “But it is not so simple, as you have worried.”
“You know about the magic they’re using?” Laila asked.
“I do. It is not as bad as you fear it is, but it is worse than you had hoped,” the tree said. “They are not in contact with our greatest foe. That is not where they have gotten the magic.”
“Where did they get it?” Iliantha asked.
“The enemy who started this war.” Lux then, right? “But it is ours. Yours, do gràs.”
Again, it was looking directly at Laila.
She furrowed her brows. “You know who I am.”
“A tree knows a tree.” It was hard to tell, but those bark lips seemed to tilt up into a smile. No matter how odd that sentence sounded, it was actually quite beautiful. Comforting. “Fear not, Caeda knows nothing. I doubt she’d believe it if you told her. But that isn’t what matters now, do gràs. What matters is yours. Ours. The tree is the property of all Fae, our mother and our daughter, our life and our fate, and they are hurting it.”
“The magic the air an tagadh are using comes from a’ chraobh,” Laila said, confirming.
“Yes, do gràs,” the tree agreed.
“But what is it?” she asked. “What’s the purpose in using it?”
“I do not know, do gràs,” the tree said. “I only wanted to assure you that they do not work with our greatest foe.”
Pressing her lips together, Laila exhaled deeply from her nose. “Sure. Thank you, mil.”
“The pleasure is all mine,” the tree said. “Follow the deer now and remember. Only the sky will catch your fall.”
The tree closed its eyes, and the deer stood. It looked between us all, waiting for us to stand. When we did, it started again. This time, it didn’t run. It only walked to an arched opening in the bushes and waited for us to follow.
None of us spoke as we resumed our path behind the deer. I wanted to ask questions, but the look on Laila’s face told me I shouldn’t. She was deep in focus, squinting at the ground, barely looking up to acknowledge the deer.
I desperately wanted to ask, though. Why was this so upsetting to her? What did it mean? Was that normal? Could people tap into the power of the tree of life, aside from her? Was that even what the tree had meant? That’s what it sounded like to me, but I wasn’t completely sober yet, running on very little sleep, and wasn’t sure I’d understood a word. I wasn’t sure I even understood the circumstance. It was a talking tree, for fuck’s sake. We all seemed to have seen it, but that didn’t make it real.
I thousand more questions circled my brain as we crept deeper through the maze. So consumed with my thoughts, I hardly noticed the path growing dark. At the front of the group, Iliantha halted.
“Do you think this is what the lady of the lake meant?” Iliantha asked. “That the sky will catch our fall?”
I stepped closer, peering over her shoulder.
A few feet ahead was the night sky. Quite literally, I couldn’t tell where the sky above ended, and this one began. Bushes still lined the path on my left and right, but a foot or two ahead, they melded into the sky above and the sky before us.
If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was a green screen, draped up the wall and onto the floor. But there was no projector. There was no light, only cerulean sparkled with stars and nebulas.
“If I had to guess,” Laila said. She walked past me, then straight into the sky.
Like a vacuum, it sucked her in. She vanished, and only sky remained.
The deer hopped in behind her.
Before I had the chance, the others followed her. Of course they did. She was their god. What she believed, they believed.
I did not have the faith they did.
But I remembered.
