All those magics taking sides and taking votes. Did we help Cardamom, the dryad whose ink and steady hand had saved us all those years ago?
Did we leave him in the dark, just like he’d left us, severed, alone?
Magic tumbled like leaves grasping to find purchase in a whirlwind.
The Crossroads loved him. The Crossroads wanted him. The Crossroads didn’t want to be abandoned again.
If I were honest, a small amount of the magic that wound through this place was his. Uniquely sketched into the beams and cracks all those years ago when he’d found me. When he’d gifted me with the first drawn line that solidified the connection between me and the Crossroads.
“Is your tree okay? Right now?” I asked.
The Crossroads settled, a wash of magic slipping into nooks, filling little crannies. Just asking the question had decided one thing: I wasn’t throwing him out.
Yet.
“It is. Currently. But its life is very literally at her whim.”
The chance to stay out of this was narrowing down and down. I could almost see my exit, my refusal, way out there like a light pouring through a doorway, becoming narrower and narrower as the door swung shut.
Card rubbed his fingertips across the edge of the table, feeling out the nicks and scratches.
“I know things didn’t... I know between us, right now... it’s not good,” he said. “But there was a time... I’m not asking for payback, for... What I did was given freely. I’m not... You don’t owe me. You don’t owe me anything.
“But I am asking. Please, Erica, don’t let her kill my tree.”
ChapterThree
The engine was louder now,louder than it should be. Fate wanted me to know she was here.
Val stood at one of the windows, his wolf sitting solidly within him, ready to become one creature, ready to fight, if needed. “She’s, no,they’repulling up on the side of the road.” He turned his dark glittering gaze to me. “Three of them.”
“Well, that explains the engine noise.” Fate could take any shape she desired. She was a god, after all. I had never met her, in any form, in all the years I’d been standing this post.
I didn’t like gods much, and in return, they largely ignored me.
But not this time. Not today. Because of one bad decision I’d made years ago.
Several bad decisions,I thought as the months Card had stayed here on my land, his feet on these stones, his laughter in this air, rolled through my mind.Or maybe not all of them had been bad.
“She is one,” I said to Val. “She is three. Usually three when she wants to make a point.”
“Or negotiate,” Card said. “Who are you talking to?”
Card sat slouched at my kitchen table, but the edges of him had tensed. As if he expected me to set him up for an ambush, which, frankly, the jury was still hashing out the pros and cons of that.
“I should just give you to them.” I placed my plates in the sink, then adjusted the straps on my overalls. I was glad I’d gone with the tank. It made my tattoos more accessible.
“You should,” he agreed.
“Your problems are not my problems,” I said.
“They are not.”
I turned and put my fists on my hips. It wasn’t like him to be this downtrodden and agreeable. I didn’t like it.
He didn’t move, but his gaze hungrily took in the fiery glow of the tattoos covering my arms, down to my fingertips, flicking up to the ink on the wide swath of skin visible below my collar bones.
“Are you going with me to talk to them,” I asked, “or are you hiding in here like a coward?”
