Still, Octavian hesitated.
“Listen to her,” Radven said. “There isn’t time to dally.” He uncorked the cask under his arm, then looked at me.
“D-do it,” I said, nodding, and even that small movement made me queasy. “Whatever it t-takes.”
Radven stepped toward me, lifting the cask, but it was Octavian who spoke.
“Listen to me, Marigold,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically strained. “I don’t know how quickly the pain will incapacitate you, and this is the most important part. You must open yourself to Therador. To essence. Let yourself become the link. The sooner you do that, the sooner this will be done.”
None of this made any sense to me. How was I, an ordinary girl whose proudest accomplishment was keeping two dozen succulents alive, supposed to link twoworlds? Everything was just shivery pain, and it was hard to get my mind to focus on anything else.
And then Radven started pouring the Nectar.
The first splash of it on the top of my head was a shock, and then it rolled down my body, spilling across my hair and down the back of my shirt and a dozen other unpleasant places.
Last time, it took a few minutes before I felt the effects of the Nectar. This time, though, given the fact that I was already having a pretty strong reaction to the weird head piece and the amulet in my hand, my reaction was almost instant.
In less than a second, the pain went from awful-but-manageable to unbearable.
I’m pretty sure I screamed. My knees gave out beneath me, and I crumbled to the ground—or I would have, if Alastor hadn’t still clutched my hand. He partially caught me, and I’m pretty sure Octavian caught my other arm—but it was impossible to tell through the haze of pain.
There were voices on either side of me, but I couldn’t make out the words. My eyes were open, but all I could see was dark red with the occasional streak of color across it.
All I could feel was burning.
“Marigold.” My name cut through the agony just briefly, and with came it the soft pressure of breath on my ear. I knew that warm, deep rumble. “Marigold, I’ve got you. Try to sense the pull of Therador.”
There was no pull. There was nothing but suffering and quivering and burning.
“Let go,” came the voice once more, a deep rumble right at my ear. “Don’t fight it. Open yourself to Therador, Marigold.”
How?!??I wanted to scream. But I couldn’t even form words in my agony.
And then the next words to slice through the suffering made things even worse:
“Tendrils!”
I don’t know which one of them said it. I may have imagined it, for all I knew. But the panic squeezed my chest, making it even harder to breathe.
I’m going to die.
There were shouts—one or many, I couldn’t have said—then a crash that shook the entire room. Or maybe I just fell again, because I couldn’t feel as many hands holding me anymore.
I’m going to die. In pain.
My skin should have melted off by then, I was sure. Or my body should have shaken itself into a thousand pieces, each one burning. I knew I was supposed to be doing something—openingfor something,connectingto something—but I couldn’t remember what.
There were lips against my ear again. I felt them because they were soft when everything else was sharp and painful.
“I trust you,” a voice said, different from the last one. “I know you can do this.”
Those words shouldn’t have made a difference—why did it matter if someone trusted me if I still didn’t know what to do?—but somehow, miraculously,somethingbroke through.
At first it was just a twinge—more than a tickle, not quite a full sensation—and I couldn’t have said whether it came from beneath, or above, or from some other place entirely. But that twinge grew, and expanded, swelling from deep inside me and pushing the pain aside.
I gasped, and my vision cleared. All of my pain was just…gone.
The room around me was in chaos. The lights flickered, and the air vibrated with that metal-on-metal shrieking. Everywhere I looked, there were Tendrils—rising from the floor, protruding from the walls, whipping down from the ceiling. The only place theyweren’twas the huge window overlooking the bay.
