Holy foxgloves!This was the Garden.
We were in the Garden.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
“Why did you bring me here?” I screamed at Harold, knowing as I said it, it was the other way around. He’d grabbed me because I was on my way to the Garden, and he wanted entrance.
I had brought him.
I dug my fingers into the soil. The curse words had disappeared from my arm. We had to be dead to enter the Garden.
Am I dead?
“You should not be here,” Ranth said, appearing from the forest, his bare feet leaving a trail of dewdrop footprints in the grass. His pants were leafy green and gathered at the ankles. The filtered light glinted off the symbol tattooed on the center of hisgleaming chest, blurring the shape. My fingers flexed. If I was dead, maybe I didn’t care.
He flowed and glowed in the air as if he were part of the Garden itself.
“You…”
“I’m home. Thanks to you. But you should not be here.” His voice was inside of my head.
I was sure Harold didn’t hear him because Harold was talking over him. “Collector, I wish to…”
Ranth turned to Harold, but his voice didn’t seem his. “You have broken the rules, and you know well what those rules are.”
Harold dropped to his knees. “Please, I wish to be tested. I have done things of merit to offset the ill. I helped you return here. I believe I will be found worthy. I beseech you to allow me to test.” He stretched out his arms in front of him and kept his face to the ground.
“It is not my decision,” Ranth replied. But in my head, he added, “Sorrel, you must be sent back before your earthly body fails.”
My heart skipped. “I’m not dead then? But I’m dying?”
“Your spirit is here, and without it, your body will decay. As if you spent too long in the planar space, you could not return to the earth. It is the same.”
I looked at my hands. They didn’t have the planar thinness. I was here and solid. How was that possible, and how long could I stay here?
With Harold on the ground pleading, “Please, mercy,” it was hard to think at all.
Ranth’s voice soaked into me like coconut oil on sun-warm skin. “I need to take care of you first, but Harold’s presence will drag on me until the decision is made.”
He knelt down in front of Harold and touched the ground. Roots wrapped up Ranth’s wrists, and his eyes glowed greenishbrown. His husky voice amplified, as if his words were someone else’s. “If you wish to be tested, then choose a tree to climb, and we shall see how far you get.”
I hugged myself with shaking hands. The voice—so not Ranth’s—was so powerful it pulled my will from me, turning me insignificant. No power should be that absolute, but here it was, controlling Ranth. And like Harold, I was at its mercy.
Harold crawled toward the forest groveling, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
To see this grand man, who Ranth had called Eminence, reduced to a pathetic desperation turned him unworthy for whatever he desired most. I anchored my attention to Ranth. “I… I want to find the Sisters.”
Ranth stood up. “That’s not possible. Only the spirits can travel to them. You would have to leave your life behind.”
“If I’m here and we visited Harold’s construct, then there must be a way to walk to other worlds.”
“Harold’s world was designed to be entered by a portal. You are here because we were cursed together. But your entrance to the Garden removed that curse.”
My tattoo was gone. “But you could travel to the other world?”
“Technically, but I can’t?—”
“Then I want it back. I want the curse back so I can travel,” I called out to the sky.
