I looked sharply at Naî, who pulled back on her haunches, sitting upright. She rubbed her front paws together. “Ididtell you that the hole in your head left room for other magics.”
“I thought you meant dragon magic.”
“You relearned animal speak. There’s no reason you couldn’t learn this.” Naî licked one of her paws, drawing it across the crest on her head. She closed her eyes. “Elven magic was also taught by the One Dragon.”
Before I could ask any questions, Lady Chaliko rushed forward, grabbing hold of my hands tightly. “You could help. You could help us fulfill the task.”
“How?” I drew my hands away from hers. Her skin was too warm, as though she had absorbed the heat of the swamp during her time here.
“My brothers tried, but… it didn’t work. Whatever magic they had was snuffed out. They left, joining the Pirate King. It was the only way they could think of to help.” Lady Chaliko looked at me, her eyes shining. “But with you, we’ll have more than one magic user. Maybe we’ll have enough to save one of these trees, to let one of the dragons grow.”
“Lady Chaliko,whois the other magic user?”
Lady Chaliko’s forehead creased, and she started to speak before biting her lip. She shook her head. “Not until you promise to help.”
“I will not make any promises.” I kept my voice firm. I couldn’t lie to her. Not when she had so much hope, not when the desperation in her gaze felt like yet another stone placed upon my grave.
“You must.” She hesitated. “You must want peace, too. Youcome from the north. What hope is there for your nation with the Imperium at war?”
“Lady Chaliko?—”
“Iam the other magic user.” The voice that rang out was familiar, and I let my head drop. I had been hoping it wasn’t true, even though it was the only thing that made sense.
“Riini.” I watched as Sagam’s sister seemed to melt from between the plants, coming into existence as though crawling out of one of the trunks of the stunted saplings. “You take after your brother and your sister?”
“I take after mymother.” Her eyes were no longer childlike and they shined in the darkness with the same fluorescence I saw in the plants. They glowed a bright green that faded to pale blue as she looked out across the greenhouse of dying elder trees.
“Your mother taught you elven magic?” I didn’t approach her, feeling my whole body tense. Her ability to move from one place to the other was the sort of magic that made her the most dangerous person I might ever fight.
“She taught all of us magic, although we didn’t know that at the time. Before she died, she gave us tea. She said it was an old remedy.” Riini stepped toward the dead seedling that would never be an elder tree and dug her fingers down into the dirt, tearing out something and bringing it into the light. She dusted it off with her fingers. “She knew she was dying, and she knew at least one of us would have the gift.”
“You drank tea made from the elder trees’ roots,” Naî said. From their flinches, both Lady Chaliko and Riini heard her.
Riini nodded. “My brother and sister both have some of the magic, but not enough to know what the gift did.”
“You poor thing. How cruel your mother must have been.” Naî shook her head, then began to shift. I looked away, even as Lady Chaliko stared at her, mouth falling open. Riini didn’t look away from the elder tree root she held in her hand, thediseased thing nearly gray, mold or fungus already consuming the root.
I glanced down at Naî to see that she had finished. I had no clothing to offer her, so I cleared my throat. “Lady Chaliko?”
“Oh!” Lady Chaliko pulled off the outer layer of her dress, carefully helping Naî into it. She rolled up the sleeves with familiarity, clearly used to helping children into clothes that didn’t fit. She was just barely out of childhood herself, and yet she had spent most of her life caring for other children.
“My mother wasn’t cruel,” Riini said, tucking the root into her pocket. “She knew that there was no other way for me to learn the magic I would need to survive in the short time she had before dying. She knew that when the emperor and his soldiers burned the elder trees that grew in the Imperium, there would be not a single elder tree left on the continent. Our people would die, blinded with the lack of our own history, ignorant of what was taken from us.”
“Drinking the tea of the elder tree taught you magic?” I asked, looking between Naî and Riini.
Naî spoke, her voice as high as Riini’s and just as old. “Drinking tea made from the roots of an elder tree gave her all of the knowledge the tree contained. Just as I was born with all of my mother’s memories and all of the memories of my grandmother, she has been cursed with the entire knowledge of the elven people. Not simply their magic, but also the library of information they stored in their elder trees.” Naî approached her, and in the form of a human girl, she barely reached to Riini’s chin. She reached up, cupping Riini’s cheek, her face creased in sadness. “History. Experiences. Discoveries. Magic. It is too much for a child to bear.”
“Do not dare tell me what is too much to bear.” Riini’s voice was amplified, echoed by all of the dragons in the room. They swarmed around her, their small chirps emphasizing her words. “We are the last memory of the elven people. Do not pity us, dragon of the north with your ice and your voracious appetite.Your magic iswant. It isselfish. The magic of the elves, the magic of the forest dragons, is in sacrifice.”
“Yes. You sacrificed her childhood. You sacrificed her,” I said, shaking my head. I wasn’t even sure who I was speaking to, only that the child who had once been Sagam’s sister had been transformed by the magic she carried, by the history and knowledge that took up every space inside her. “I suppose in that way the north and the elves are not so different.”
“I offered myself,” Riini said.
But the dragons echoed a different phrase. “She offered herself.”
“It’s easy to say that, after you’ve already taken hold of her.” I stepped forward, crouching down so that I was eye level with Riini. “It wasn’t just knowledge, was it? Trust me, I’ve become an expert in things living in your head. What’s in there with you?”
Riini pulled her lips back from her teeth, stepping away from Naî’s gentle hand. Her tendrils thrashed around her, nearly knocking one of the trees onto the floor before she grabbed hold of the fragile pot with her hands.
