I followed his gaze. Sure enough, about five feet up and a couple feet over, where the next branch sprouted from the trunk, there was a small door set into the bark. It was only half as tall as a normal door, with an irregular shape designed to blend in with the tree around it, and I wondered how Alastor had even known it would be here.
But that was a question for another time.
The boy was still clinging to me, his arms wrapped around my neck as I carefully eased myself to a standing position, bracing myself against the trunk for balance. Bits of loose bark flaked off beneath my boots as I found my footing, but I didn’t let myself watch them fall. One look down and I wasn’t sure I’d have the courage to keep moving.
But even without the full terror of the drop below me, there was another challenge—getting to the other branch. It wasn’t far—I could reach it—but I didn’t have the upper body strength to haul myself up onto it, either. Especially with a five-year-old hanging off of me.
“Give me the boy,” Alastor said.
He’d eased himself to his feet as well, and I twisted toward him, trying to pass the child into his arms. But the boy started writhing and crying again, refusing to release his grip on my neck. The harder I tried to pull him away from me, the harder he fought.
“I’ll pull you up right after me,” I promised the boy, trying to pry his grip from me. “You’ll be safe with Alastor. Just hold on to him while—”
He gave an extra vigorous kick that hit me right in the stomach, cutting off my words.
And knocking me off balance.
I fell to the side, still gripping the boy with one arm and desperately grabbing for the trunk with the other—
Alastor caught me, his arm looping around my waist before I could plummet to my death.
But that didn’t stop me from seeing where I’d been headed, how far I would have fallen…
The drop was at least seven stories. Maybe more. And there was so much carnage… Bodies of the fallen lying twisted and broken, people pinned beneath wooden planks. The Leonaris puppet I’d been admiring the moment before this all began was crushed beneath one of those massive branches, the golden fabric that had once been its side now stained dark with what I could only guess was the blood of the puppeteers who lay bent and mangled inside.
I was going to be sick again.
“Marigold.”
It was Alastor’s voice that brought me back—to the branch, to the child still half-fighting me, to the others waiting and watching me. Octavian had reached us now, too, and his azure eyes met mine, blazing with something I could feel even from here. But despite that gaze on me, I was frozen. We’d never make it out of this tree alive.
“I’m going to lift you both,” Alastor said. “Just grab the branch, and I’ll help push you up.”
He said it like it was so simple, like there wasn’t an eighty-foot drop beneath us, like the tree wasn’t about to shatter and break and send us all tumbling to our deaths—
“Marigold. Listen to me.” This time his voice was hard, commanding. “You have to do this.”
I can’t do this. I can’t—
“Marigold.” He said it with such authority that my eyes snapped up to him automatically.
The blank expression was gone. Before my eyes he’d become the commander, the prince. The one who was born to lead, whose very flesh and blood were bred for moments like this.
It was strange, and mesmerizing, and…
And he’s still kind of an asshole, I reminded myself.If he thinks he can just order me around—
“You can do this,” he said, and the commanding tone was gone, replaced by something softer but still firm. Solid. And then, “I trust you. I know you can do this.”
Those words…
I‘d heard those words before, back at the brothers’ mansion, just before I’d opened the portal. I’d been in so much pain, burning with it, unable to speak or see or think, and yet those words had cut through it all, had been the thing that helped me break through the agony and find the light on the other side.
I trust you. I know you can do this.
I’d assumed, at the time, that Octavian had said them to me. But now I knew, with a strange little jolt, that it had been Alastor all along.
Alastor, who in most other situations seemed to believe me less-than-competent. Who’d questioned my character on more than one occasion, and who had implied I was purposefully causing drama with his brothers—
