“There are two kinds of people,” he said. “Those who deny they carry the nails and those who admit it. My followers admit it and empty them often at my feet, just as you have done.”

He stretched out his disfigured hands, twisting them from side to side.

“Without reaching for my hands, you cannot succeed in anything that matters. If there was any other way besides the tree, do you think I would have done what I did?”

“I thought I’d learned so much,” I said. “But I forgot to call on you when I needed you most. I tried to rescue myself. But you are all I have. If I don’t remember your grace, the price you paid, if I don’t reach out to you, I’m not using all I have.”

He nodded and smiled. “When the Impostor whispered his lies to you, I was there all along, waiting for you to call on me. You never asked for my help, though finally you quoted my book to him. You resist my help because accepting it requires change and self-denial, and both are always painful. The only thing more painful than obedience is disobedience.”

He pointed at the solitary tree, perhaps the ugliest specimen I’d seen in all Thuros.

“To walk the road you must never forget the tree that defines the road.”

The King cleaned me off, lifted me up on his white horse, and walked beside it, holding the reins as he guided us down the hill. The sun wore through the dark cloud cover, and I saw the eerie shadow outlining the road.

The King helped me off the mare and pointed to the road and the city, so very close now.

As the King rode away, he gazed reflectively at the hill behind me, as if he’d spent an eternity there. I turned and looked up at the skull-shaped hill. At the top, where we’d just come from, I saw the rugged tree, nine feet tall and five feet wide. From it came the shadow that led to Charis. But how could anything so small, situated in this remote place, cast a shadow across this entire country? This was not the great tree that fell across the chasm—or was it? Could the great tree crossed by many be the same as this small tree planted just for me?

Perhaps things were not as they appeared.

I stared at the tree. It gave connection and meaning to those isolated shadows across the land. Its vertical reach united those above with those below. Its horizontal reach united me to my traveling companions. It divided history, nations, families. It divided Charis and Erebus. It was death. Yet it was life.