But if I'd never left to find the other royals, I wouldn't have known how.
I pushed the thoughts and memories away again.
Over twenty minutes, I sent the tree slowly and carefully through years and years of the growth that would've been natural for it.By the time I sat back on my heels and stared at it, I was panting, sweating, and nauseous.
There had to be hundreds of thousands of trees in their orchard. Maybe more.
My gaze followed the beautiful curve of the trunk, up to the individual branches and leaves and the fruit that was already budding enough to weigh those branches down.
The lump in my throat wasn't exhaustion.
It was memories.
Sadness.
Loss.
I should never have agreed to do this, but what was done was done.
I managed to repeat the process with two trees at the same time in the twenty minutes that followed, four in the twenty minutes that followed that, and ten in the twenty minutes that followedthat.
An hour and a half or so into the process, I had officially grown seventeen trees.
Out of hundreds of thousands.
Seventeen.
My immortal life was going to end before I finished this, if I didn't pick up the pace.
Fortunately, I knew I would be able to.
In the next hour and a half, I managed fifty more.
And in the hour that followed, I made it through another hundred.
I was soaked with rain and sweat, and absolutely covered in dirt, by the time I took a lunch break beneath one of the trees I'dgrown. I knew it was an apple tree without looking up. I could feel it.
I'd ordered a pizza to the villa an hour earlier, and texted Gwen and Jonah my location so they could send someone out with it.
I was still surprised when Gwen herself came jogging out with the pizza, and sat down next to me on the dirt as if she didn't mind ending up as filthy as I was.
I didn't have enough of my mind left to warn her that she should care, because this was freaking miserable.
She sat next to me in calm, companionable silence while I ate an entire pizza without offering her a single slice.
Afterward, I eyed the small tub of buttery garlic dip that had come with it.
I seriously considered drinking it, but shook my head.
Not today, Garlic Butter.
I couldn't let myself be that desperate.
It wasn't even real butter.
"How many calories does it take to fuel growth like this?" Gwen mused, studying the trees around us.
They looked a hell of a lot better than the trees that had been here before. Not that mine was an unbiased opinion.
