A sound, low and resonant, nothing like the distress frequency of earlier. It’s more of a feeling resonating in your chest, like a low note from an organ, than something you hear. It moved through the walls and the floor and the entry until it reached the door.
The door opened.
Not pushed, not triggered by any visible mechanism. It simply opened, swinging wide, and the afternoon air camethrough it, cool and carrying the smell of the Wyrdwood after rain, clean and ordinary and vast.
Beyond the door, the thorns were moving.
I watched them peel back from the path slowly, deliberately. Not the way they had opened for my father, that responsive parting to a command. This was different. This was the barrier that had been built to keep everything out, standing aside for the people it had been built to let through.
The path opened to reveal the remaining king’s guard.
Thane made a short sound that was almost a laugh but not quite.
Malric looked at the open door and the clear path and then looked at me.
“Ready?” he said.
I thought about years of looking at the Wyrdwood through glass. The leaves I’d watched turn and fall and return without ever hearing them break under my feet. The air I’d smelled through open windows and never breathed properly, all the longing of wanting to be outside the tower.
I thought about my mother building a tower with an open door in it, waiting for the day the door could finally be used.
“Yes,” I said.
I picked up the crown and put it on. Then I walked through the door first.
The air hit me the way I had always imagined it would, and it was nothing like I had imagined, because reality was never the same as imagination. It was cold and real, and I could smell the rain-wet bark of the trees and the turned earth of the path.
I stopped on the threshold and looked up.
The sky was enormous.
Thane came through the door behind me, stopped beside me and looked up too, and I heard him exhale, as if preparing for what was to come.
Malric came through last.
The tower settled peacefully, its mission complete. The thorns closed behind us. Not shutting us out, just reforming the barrier until needed again. The tower stood behind them in the morning light, the same tower I had looked at from inside my entire life, and from outside, it looked like what it was.
My mother’s gift.
Malric’s hand found mine.
On my other side, Thane’s shoulder came against mine, and the three of us stood at the edge of the Wyrdwood at the beginning of the path and the bond between us steady and present and entirely real.
I took the first step toward the trees, toward my future.
Epilogue
AVELINE
Six months.
That was how long it had taken to dismantle a kingdom built on fear and rebuild something that didn’t require it as a foundation. Malric would say it had taken considerably less time than he’d projected, and then he would qualify that by listing every variable he’d failed to take into consideration, because that was how Malric was built.
Thane would say it felt longer.
I stood at the window of what had been the king’s war room and was now something else, something we hadn’t finished naming yet, and watched the morning come up over the eastern forest. From this height, the Wyrdwood was a dark continuous mass at the horizon, broken only by the pale thread of the road that ran through it toward the tower. The castle had not been far from the tower, to my surprise, but access to the tower had been problematic due to the protections of the Wyrdwood. Now things were a little simpler now that the tower was at peace.
The tower was still standing. That had been one of the first questions, in the days after, when we’d walked out of the Wyrdwood and into the beginning of the world rearranging itself around the absence of the king. I had asked Malric whether thedamage was structural, whether the cracks the tower had made in its own walls during the fight would compromise it. He had gone back in and spent two days with his hands on the stone, then he had come out and said the tower had known what it was doing. The damage was superficial. The foundation was unchanged.
