“What did you do to those vines?” Helfyra cried.
Saeldian turned to the elf and smiled. “I decided I didn’t want them anymore. Take my hand.”
Saeldian shook their head when Helfyra offered her good hand. “The other one.”
She laid her black-knotted, blighted limb in Saeldian’s hand and shuddered.
“Know your hand is healed. Know that it’s whole, and limber, and strong. You are as you should be. You are Helfyra of the summer’s journey into autumn, of the frog-sung night, when the moon gazes at her own face in the mirror-still waters of the lake. You are as you should be.”
Light shone from their clasped hands as bright as a star. Kell blinked violet spots out of his vision, but Helfyra was restored—and she wrenched her hand out of Saeldian’s.
“What have you done?”
“I cleansed you,” Saeldian said, “with the power of the realm.”
Saeldian turned to the silent, awestruck gathering huddled around the casket. Ilondrel emerged from the crowd, her brightsnow-and-ice gown smeared with rotten black ochre and dried red blood.
“You have come back,” she said. “For my life?”
“No. I never meant for this to happen,” Saeldian said. “All of this…I didn’t want it.”
Kell nearly choked. Ilondrel had been majestic, as if starlight had decided to learn what it was like to be flesh. Now she was…mortal, and the only one untouched by the withering blight that crept across the bodies of her subjects.
Ilondrel stepped on a rotten questing tendril. “What did you want, then?”
“I thought it was just a job,” Saeldian said. “I thought it was Kell getting revenge on me at first. But then—too late, I admit—I understood that we had been taken for fools. I did what I had to do to finish the job I was given, but I didn’t know that it would make all of this. I thought I was replacing something stolen. I didn’t know—I swear! I didn’t know.”
“Know?” Jubilee asked. “What are you talking about?”
“I was told to be careful of the spells on the casket when I was replacing—I mean, planting the false Kiss, and when those spells went quiet, I used a spell on the gem we replaced.”
Ilondrel gave a grudging nod for Saeldian’s deduction. “That’s what did it, I’m sure.”
“So I’m linked to the false Kiss, and it started a spell that’s withering the domain,” Saeldian said. “Then we left, and the witch came, and I was going to stay behind to save your lives in trade for my own, and I still had power after that. I didn’t know how, but it’s got to be the stone I planted.”
“It stole Hearthaven’s Repose from me,” Ilondrel said. “You command this realm now. It belongs to you. Everything I built, everything this place was for—you stole it. All of it.”
“I didn’t want that,” Saeldian said. “How do I undo it?”
“Don’t be silly, my dear.”
Kell had his knife in his hand before Osalor finished the sentence.
And there he was, gliding along on a little pocket of force that had carried him over the water.
“Of course you didn’t know. I went to great lengths to make sure that it was a surprise. This is the culmination of everything I have worked for since the day we met.”
Saeldian looked pale and gray.
Osalor, dressed in the creamy white of plumeria petals, soft gold and shell pink showing in the folds of his silken robes, floated over the ash and rot of the ground.
“It’s you,” Saeldian said. “You were our employer.”
“Surprise,” Osalor said, and smiled with the rotten joy of seeing his evil done just the way he wanted. “But here we are, and you’ve done beautifully. I promised that when the time came, you would have the world in your hands.”
“This is what you wanted?” Saeldian asked. “You wanted Hearthaven destroyed?”
“To get my revenge? Of course I did.”
