“Well, for starters, they tried to kill me before we exchanged marriage vows.”
Argento laughed. “Ah. You have the family taste for the eager and bloodthirsty ones, I see.”
“It would appear so,” said Arris, grimacing. “Clearly, my taste cannot be trusted. This way is much better. More egalitarian.”
It also spared him the stifling horror of another ballroom. He could not think in those spaces. Nor could he imagine limping through the same conversations only to be fooled. Again.
Argento huffed. “If I were you, I’d start thinking whether you’re better suited to being a willow or an oak.”
Arris decided now was not the time to inform his grandfather that he wasn’t even sure he wanted to come back as a tree at all. He could just as well… keep going. His great-grandmother Fawna of the Ulva Wyldes had done just that. Instead of a second life she had chosen the final death. Herchoice had so saddened his great-grandfather Hadrian that he did not put forth leaves for a whole decade.
“Where did she go?” Arris had once asked him.
“Only Wrate knows,” Hadrian had said, shrugging his branches. “Some say Wrate made the Isle of Malys and then vanished. Others say he became the Isle, for its magic must come from somewhere. Whatever it is, it is a mystery that will one day be known to each of us when the time comes.”
Plenty of his grandfather trees and grandmother rocks had assured him that it was possible to enjoy your second life as much as—if not more than—your first.
“And what of love?” Arris asked. “Could I find love as a tree?”
“What is your great obsession with romantic love, boy?” Argento asked.
“I hardly noticed the lack of it,” Nebo, who was now a gigantic fern, airily responded.
Was he obsessed with love? Arris didn’t think so. He was obsessed with living, and finding love was his best chance of it. The idea of a long, full life necessarily encapsulated love… and with every day, Arris felt as though he had less and less a chance of knowing it. These were feelings he wasn’t sure he’d be able to sort out even if he had a whole century as a tree, but it didn’t stop him from trying. When he was thirteen, he had attempted to write a poem about it. It went like this:
I am a cog in a great machine
And I find it… very mean
I am told I am of value
But my heart suffers an ague!
For to the world I am but a tool
Descended of Enzo the Fool!
If I mattered to someone, though it be brief
Then I might regard my death without grief
If I knew the realm of love, then might I know peace?
Before I, Arris the Prince, become deceased?
It was a terrible poem. So terrible in fact that when he read it aloud, a stray wind found itself so offended that it swept the paper off the breakfast table and straight into the fire. His sister had muttered a weak “Oh no” and Arris had never written a poem again.
After his third broken engagement, Arris had little hope of finding love. Proposing a competition had been his meager attempt at extending what time he had left to live. If there were trials and teas and dinners and general fussing about, then each of those was a day he had stolen from one life to the next. He might waste it with delicious abandon or devote himself to his reading. He could study the patterns of the stars, sample delicacies the kitchens would trot out before guests or read books until the sun rose. He could swim. He could walk. He might even dance. He could be kissed by a dozen beauties, and if they tried to murder him, then at least he could not fault the view.
Arris had very little hope of love, let alone a long first life, but still—even now—he hoped. That he might love and be loved. That he might know the splendors of a long lifefilled with uneventful horrors, like finding silver in his hair and repeating the same stories to the gentle disdain of his relations.
Arris sighed. Beyond the families of the gentry, there might be someone who saw the world as he did. Someone who would view his heart as a powerful home for love and not a haven for the love of power. Someone who would not just extend the days of his life, but expand the meaning of it.
And if there was any chance that she existed, then this was his last chance to find her.
9A Love Worth Several Lives
The morning of the competition dawned and Arris awoke to see his sister, Yvlle, crouched over his bed with a knife in her hand. Although Arris was nearly a foot taller, she was very obviously his twin. They had the same dark hair and dark eyes, same ears that stuck out ever so slightly, same set to the chin. The difference was in the intensity. His mother remarked that Arris’s face looked like it had been sketched by a poet’s quill. His father often said Yvlle’s face looked like it had been drawn with a thunderbolt.
