He squeezed my hand again. “I know I don’t deserve your help, but this rose bush protects all of Sirun and—in some ways—all of Hemlit. Its magic also strengthens and protects me, though, so I’ll understand if you don’t want to help it.”
I shook my head. “I wouldn’t let a plant suffer poison if I could help it, regardless of who else benefited. But—”
I met his eyes. He was so hopeful that I worried he did not understand. “But I cannot say that it will help. I’ve always sung to plants, and I’ve had many die before. If there’s magic in my song, I’ve never been aware of it.”
“I will be grateful for any attempt you make, whether or not it works.” His voice had turned husky, like perhaps he, too, was fighting a tendency to tears tonight.
I swallowed and squeezed his arm before moving away from him. “Let’s see what happens, then.”
He followed me up to the rose bush and stood beside me as I wrapped my hand around a branch, carefully dodging thorns. “The magic is so thick here,” I told him, “that I can feel it like waves cresting against me.”
He brushed a leaf with his thumb. “I can feel it too, but I cannot see anything besides the plant.”
“It’s so concentrated, that it looks like water at the top of a waterfall, just bursting with bright pink energy. But interspersed throughout it, like a foreign wisp of smoke inside a cloud, are tendrils of dark violet-colored magic. It feels fae, like the pink, but also different, like it’s malevolent and intent on destruction.”
Aedan raised his brows. “Are we touching it?”
I nodded. “It’s everywhere the pink is, but much less abundant,so I didn’t notice it until I compared the pink in the new sprout to the pink everywhere else.” I let go of the tree and faced him. “I don’t know if singing will help or not.”
“I know,” he said. “I won’t blame you if it doesn’t.”
I turned back around and reached for the branch—
“Stop!” A new voice interrupted. I spun to see who was talking, but Aedan ran in front of me, blocking my view… and taking a forceful hit of concentrated, powerful, dark purple magic.
Magic that had been heading straight for me.
When it hit Aedan, he crumpled to his hands and knees and gasped for breath.
Since when had he been willing to protect me?Since the day you first met him,a snarky voice in my head answered.
“Step away from the rose tree,” a tall newcomer commanded as she raised a threatening hand. I’d seen her once before—in the courtyard on my first day in Sirun. She’d appeared friendly then. Tonight, though…
Tonight she was attacking.
Aedan jumped in front of me again, and smoke started to rise off his body.
“Aedan,” the intruder instructed, “do not burn the rose tree!”
“Then stand down,” he said in a low, menacing tone. “She has come with me.Youshould not be here.”
“She has twisted your mind,” the woman said, “tricked you into trusting her so she could destroy the rose. It will weaken your magic!”
“Aunt Acantha,” he growled. “Drop your magic and leavethis cavern.”
AuntAcantha? Would he really attack his own aunt to protect me?
She stepped closer. “I am trying to protect you,” she hissed, “from a viper dressed as a sheep! I don’t know what she has done to your mind, but I will not let her destroy you!”
The smoke rising from Aedan thickened until small flames danced like a halo around his body. How did the heat not burn him?
That was a question for later… that and the way his magic vibrated like his aunt’s, and the way they both harmonized with the fae magic in the tree.
“She is not here to destroy anything.” Aedan’s voice carried the timber of the drekkan, and the threat of violence. I did not want to see him strike his aunt down out of fear for me. If the weight of my mother’s accidental death made him want to surrender his own life, what would a deliberate death of someone he knew do?
“Then take her away from this place,” Acantha said. “That is the closest I will come to compromising.”
Aedan growled again. “You have no right to tell me—”
