“It’ll give me time to get more. To make more water.”
“Lottie, please,” Arthur rasped. “Please. He’ll die without it.”
He tried to remove the acorn from his neck, but Charlotte gripped his hands. Her eyes widened: Despite the acorn, the black veins did not slow. Each breath he took rattled worse than the last. His lungs struggled to expand and contract.
His sister’s voice wobbled. “Why isn’t it working?”
“Reckon nothing’ll help now.” Elspeth touched Charlotte’s shoulder. “I’ll stay with him, if you want. You should get out of here, before the whole forest goes.”
“I’m not leaving without the two of you.”
“Things’re different now, Lottie,” Elspeth said gently. “There’s nothing to be done for him. And the kids are out here, too. You want them safe, don’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“She’s right.” Arthur extricated his hands from her grasp, his fingers stiff and cold. “You could make it safely away with the children.”
Charlotte’s eyes welled with tears. “I came here for you.”
He smiled crookedly. “I know. It’s the best thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
That he would die in the forest anyway, in the end, didn’t matter. It was enough that she’d come after him. That she’d done something so deeply impractical, with so little hope of success, simply because she loved him and he’d needed her.
His own failure was harder to bear. For thirty years, Ira had been resigned to his fate. To dying because his forest was dying, because they were irrevocably bound together. Arthur had made him believe it didn’t have to be that way—but there Ira was, lying on the other side of the stump, dying anyway.
Arthur pushed to his feet and stumbled toward him, coughing.
“Arthur—”
Every step was agony. He hunched, clinging to the stump for support as he rounded it.
Maud turned her wrinkled brown face to him as he approached. Like her ravens, she had a faded quality. Not translucent, not veined in black, but glimmering in and out the way the wild huntsman had. Her silver eyes dimmed. With one withered, vanishing hand, she clutched Ira’s fingers.
Blood matted in Ira’s shirt, his fur. His ears twitched asArthur approached. He turned his head weakly, nostrils flaring. Calyx twined thinly around one wrist. Blood stained the stump red.
Arthur knelt at his side, numb. Then, suddenly, not numb at all. His skin prickled, tears coursed down his cheeks, and he pressed his forehead to Ira’s and wept. They’d made it here. They’dmadeit, yet it was ending this way. Ira raised a clawed hand to touch his cheek, but it fell back to his side.
Around them, leaves wilted and dropped from trees. Vines crumbled to ash. Dead birds rotted away until nothing remained but skeletons. Calyx’s leaves curled, blackened, and dropped off.
Arthur’s breath hitched. His fingers curled in Ira’s fur, his chest buzzing with sudden hope. They still had one acorn.
He fumbled with the chain, but his fingers had gone stiff and aching. Behind him, Charlotte had approached cautiously, despite their efforts to send her away.
Kneeling beside him, she undid the chain and handed him the acorn. “What are you thinking?”
“I think,” Arthur said, “he’s the heart of the wood.”
“Of course he is.” Maud’s creaky voice had a faded quality like her form. “He and the tree. Twin anchor points. Like binary stars.”
Then this would work. They were bound to each other, Ira and the tree, both necessary to keep the forest alive. As the tree was the one that had been dying, Ira hadn’t been so concerned with himself. The tree had been replanted; now Ira would be. It would work.
It had to work, because if it didn’t, Ira was going to die. And the forest, and Arthur, would die alongside him.
Ira was barely breathing. Arthur kissed his forehead.
“Come back to me,” he whispered, and he pressed the acorn to Ira’s heart.
As the other had at the stump, the acorn glowed, then melted into him.
