“You don’t need sorcerers, Silvan. You are the grandson of Lorac Caladon. You can end what your grandfather began. You have the power to bring down the shield. Come with me.” Mina held out her hand to him. “I will show you what you must do.”
Silvan took hold of her hand, small-boned, fine. He drew close to her, looked down into her eyes. He saw himself, shining in the amber.
“You must kiss me,” she said and she lifted her lips.
Silvan was quick to obey. His lips touched hers, tasted the sweetness for which he hungered.
Not far distant, Kiryn kept watch beside the body of his uncle.
He had seen Silvanoshei fall. He had known that his cousin was dead, for no one could survive the dragon’s poisoned breath.
Kiryn grieved for them both, for his cousin, for his uncle. Both had been deluded by Glaucous. Both had paid the price. Kiryn had knelt beside his uncle to wait for his own death, wait for the dragon to slay them.
Kiryn watched, astonished, to see the human girl, Mina, lift her head and regain her feet. She was strong, alert, seemingly untouched by the poison. She looked down at Silvanoshei, lying at her side. She kissed the lifeless lips, and to Kiryn’s amazement and unease, his cousin drew in a breath.
Kiryn saw Mina act to rally the flagging spirits of the elven archers. He heard her voice, crying out the order to fire in Elvish.
He watched his people rally, watched them battle back against their foe. He watched the dragon die.
He watched all with boundless gladness, a gladness that brought tears to his eyes, but with a sense of unease in his heart.
Why had the human done this? What was her reason? Why had she watched her army kill elves one day and acted to save elves the next?
He watched her embrace Silvan. Kiryn wanted to run to them, to snatch his cousin away from the girl’s touch. He wanted to shake him, shake some sense into him. But Silvan would not listen.
And why should he? Kiryn thought.
He himself was confused, stunned by the day’s awful events.
Why should his cousin listen to Kiryn’s words of warning when the only proof he could offer of their veracity was a dark shadow that passed over his soul every time he looked upon the girl, Mina.
Kiryn turned away from them. Reaching down, he closed his uncle’s staring eyes with a gentle touch. His duty, as a nephew, was to the dead.
“Come with me, Silvan,” Mina urged him, her lips soft against his cheek. “Do this for your people.”
“I do this for you, Mina,” Silvan whispered. Closing his eyes, he placed his lips on hers.
Her kiss was honey, yet it stung him. He drank in the sweetness; flinched from the searing pain. She drew him into darkness, a darkness that was like the darkness of the storm cloud. Her kiss was like the lightning bolt, blinded him, sent him tumbling over the edge of a precipice. He could not stop his fall. He crashed against rocks, felt his bones breaking, his body bruised and aching. The pain was excruciating, and the pain was ecstasy. He wanted it to end so badly that he would have been glad for death.
He wanted the pain to last beyond forever.
Her lips drew away from his, the spell was broken.
As though he had come back from the dead, Silvan opened his eyes and was amazed to see the sun, the blood-red sun of twilight. Yet it had been noontime when he had kissed her. Hours had passed, seemingly, but where had they gone? Lost in her, forgotten in her. All around him was still and quiet. The dragon had vanished. The armies were nowhere in sight. His cousin was gone. Silvan slowly realized that he no longer stood on the fie’d of battle. He was in a garden, a garden he dimly recognized by the fading light of the waning sun.
I know this place, he thought dazedly. It seems familiar. Yet where I am? And how do I come to be here? Mina! Mina! He was momentarily panicked, thinking he had lost her.
He felt her hand close over his, and he sighed deeply and clasped his hand over hers.
I stand in the Garden of Astarin, he realized. The palace garden.
A garden I can see from my bedroom window. I came here once, and I hated it. The place made my flesh crawl. There—a dead plant. And another and another. A tree dying as I watch, its leaves curling and twisting as if in pain, turning gray, falling off. The only reason there are any living plants at all in this garden is because the palace gardeners and the Woodshapers replace the dead plants with living plants from their own personal gardens. Yet, to bring anything living into this garden is to sentence it to death.
Only one tree survives in this garden. The tree in the very heart of the garden. The tree they call the Shield Tree, because it was once surrounded by a luminous shield nothing could penetrate. Glaucous claimed the magic of the tree kept the shield in place. So it does, but the tree’s roots do not draw nourishment from the soil. The tree’s roots extend into the heart of every elf in Silvanesti.
He felt the tree’s roots coiling inside him.
Taking hold of Mina by the hand, Silvanoshei led her through the dying garden to the tree that grew in the center. The Shield Tree lived. The Shield Tree thrived. The Shield tree’s leaves were green and healthy, green as the scales of the green dragon. The Shield Tree’s trunk was blood-colored, seemed to ooze blood, as they looked at it. Its limbs contorted, wriggled like snakes.
I must uproot the tree. I am the Grandson of Lorac. I must tear the tree’s roots from the hearts of my people, and so I will free them. Yet I am loathe to touch the evil thing. I’ll find an axe, chop it down.
Though you were to chop it down a hundred times, a voice whispered to him, a hundred times it would grow back.
It will die, now that Cyan Bloodbane is dead. He was the one who kept it alive.
You are the one keeping it alive. Mina spoke no word, but she laid her hand on his heart. You and your people. Can’t you feel its roots twisting and turning inside you, sapping your strength, sucking the very life from you?
Silvan could feel something wringing his heart, but whether it was the evil of the tree or the touch of her hand, he could not tell.
He caught up her hand and kissed it. Leaving her standing on the path, among the dying plants, he walked toward the living tree. The tree sensed its danger. Gray vines twined around his ankles. Dead branches fell on him, struck him on the back and on his shoulder. He kicked at the vines and tossed the branches away from him.
As he drew near the tree, he felt the weakness. He felt it grow on him the closer he came. The tree sought to kill him as it had killed so many before him. Its sap ran red with the blood of. his people. Every shining leaf was the soul of a murdered elf.
The tree was tall, but its trunk was spindly. Silvan could easily place his hands around it. He was weak and wobbly from the aftereffects of the poison and wondered if he would have the strength to pull it from the ground.
You have the strength. You alone.
Silvan wrapped his hands around the tree trunk. The trunk writhed in his grasp like a snake, and he shuddered at the horrible feeling.
He let loose, fell back. If the shield falls, he thought, suddenly assailed by doubt, our land will lie unprotected.
The Silvanesti nation has stood proudly for centuries protected by the courage and skill of its warriors. Those days of glory will return. The days when the world respected the elves and honored them and feared them. You will be king of a powerful nation, a powerful people.
I will be king, Silvan repeated to himself. She will see me puissant, noble, and she will love me.
He planted his feet on the ground. He took firm hold of—the slithering tree trunk and, summoning strength from his excitement, his love, his ambition, his dreams, he gave a great heave into his own heart for when it released, his strength and his will increased. He pulled and tugged, his shoulders straining. He felt more roots give, and he redoubled his efforts.