Regardless. When he guided us toward the tower and the tree, I took one last look back at the audience, at the queens, and followed. The time to regret coming to Neverwhen was long gone. Now, I went through.
Soldiersin their shiny silver armors were there to open a large wooden door on the side of the tower, just inches before it met the thick roots of the tree it was attached to. The inside was dark. No windows anywhere on the walls, but there were fires burning on top of torches.
“The tower only exists to support the Tree of Years,” Calren said from the side where he’d stopped, holding hiscane in both hands, his knuckles white. “Your challenges will be in there until the last level.” And he looked up at the tree part of the structure.
None of us said anything.
“Good-timing to all of you.” His voice shook a little. I pretended I couldn’t tell.
When the soldiers stepped to the sides, we all walked ahead and into the open door of the tower.
Cold. Dark, like we were suddenly in a different world. And once we were all inside the round hallway, the heavy wooden door closed.
The sound of it was so final. If there was a ceiling over us, it was too far up and the light from the torches couldn’t reach it. The second of silence that followed felt and tasted like dread to me.
Then Helen cleared her throat. “I don’t know about you, but I’m eager to get to the top of that tree. So…” She nodded her head to the left. An archway that curved to the right a few feet in was the only way from here—there was nothing else in the tower, no other doors or stairs or anything. “Off we go.”
We were all eager to get to the top of that tree, too, so nobody argued.
“You okay?” March whispered as we went through the archway, and the air shifted yet again. Became…heavier and infused with the scent of wet wood.
“Yes,” I said, even if I wasn’t entirely sure of it. But I was standing. Walking. Perfectly aware of my surroundings. “You?”
A smile that only reached half of its potential. “I think so.” We were all asokayas we could be, considering.
“Stairs,” Helen said as she followed the narrow corridor the archway led us to. “There’s stairs there—C’mon.”
Up the stairs we went—and then the tower merged into the tree in the strangest way I’d ever seen.
“This was built by a Club,” Seth said as we approached the hole on the stone wall that seemed to have been made by the tree itself. Its roots and branches and vines had spread tothisside of the tower, too, slithering across the ceiling and crawling on the walls and the floor like tentacles.
“Do the towers in your court look like this?” Cook asked, and I knew he was just trying to keep himself distracted as we went through that hole. No more stone blocks beneath our feet, only thick wood made of roots and vines, branches, leaves, moss—which led us to a whole other world.
“Wow,” I breathed when I looked up and saw the magnitude of the inside of the Tree of Years.
“Absolutely not,” Mimi said. “Nothing in our court looks quite likethis.”
We all stopped to admire the view for a moment. I doubtedanyplace in the realm came close to this. This was pure magic, and it buzzed in the air like electricity. It smelled of flowers in here, too, not just wet wood. It smelledgreen.
I’d call it a forest, except it wasindoorssomehow. An indoor forest that stretched farther than my eye could see, with a canopy on the side too thick to make out anything beyond. It went up forever, it seemed, and the way the branches and the roots and the ropes and the vines were twisted and intertwined together, you’d think it was all a big network.
Leaves as big as my entire body, and ones as small as the palm of my hand. Flowers and mushrooms everywhere on what I assumed were branches that rose from the floor and extended from the sides—or maybe they could be trees on their own. They were thick enough to be considered trunks—some bigger than any real trunk I’d ever seen in my life. It was all connected.
An indoor forest—how curious, but the strangest thing of all were these rings on the barks, some rough and some smoother. They were bigger than my head, just rings within rings within rings, glowing a bright blue color. So full of magic I could have sworn I heard crackling in the air when the birds we couldn’t even see stopped chirping for a second or two.
I thought the masquerade ball with the self-playing instruments and the masks and the illusions posing as real people was mind-blowing—butthisexceeded anything I could have ever possibly imagined.
“Guys, I think I’m in love with this place,” Mimi whispered. “Look at these flowers. Look at these mushrooms!” She spread her arm about as she spun around and went deeper and deeper into the tree, inhaling hard and loud. “And do yousmellthat?!”
We certainly did. It smelled like you’d imagine the Everstill to smell. Just…pure and good and exactly the right amount of sweet.
Some of the fear shed off me as we all moved deeper inside the tree, looking about, analyzing the branches and the leaves, the wood and the barks that were hard and smooth, straight and twisted into knots—all from one step to the other. So different, but all part of the same body at the same time.
I even found myself smiling a little bit as I touched my fingertips to the wood and the leaves and even went close to inspect one of those glowing rings. The heat that came off it was impossible to mistake—it was magic, all right. These branches, this whole place was brimming with it.
Then I saw the flowers just beyond that thick branch I’d been inspecting.
My smile widened. “Guys—look!”
