She reaches out to me, her fingers rich with animate midnight, and I panic. I step back without stepping back, trapped in the motionless torpor of the dream. My body won’t respond—I don’t even think I have a body. She’s going to touch me, and it’s going to end. Everything. If she touches me, I know she’ll come to us, to Lucien and Malachite and Fione in the camp, and hurt them. Capture them. Using my body. Using her magic. And I can’t even move to stop it.

Just as the shrill panic in my head crescendos, she freezes, fingers inches from my unface. Something slithers on the floating grass island where she’s standing, between her boots, and her own horror is clear as she looks down slowly. Something clear on the edges, cloudy in the middle, glinting like porcelain.

Glass.

Raw glass grows inch by inch around her boots, up, consuming it like a living thing, like a glass plant in fast motion. A thick wedge of it, boxy and smooth, encasing her leg up to the ankle. Trapping her, as I’m trapped in the dream. She tries to yank free, tries to point her blackened fingers at it to free herself with magic, but the glass stays, still and gleaming in the fire bursts from the distant battle in Windonhigh.

“What—” Her onyx eyes narrow. “What is this?”

I can’t say a thing. My mouth won’t move, or I would’ve told her. I would’ve told her the Bone Tree choker made of valkerax fangs—pressed around and into her throat like organic jewelry—is moving. Growing.

The fangs elongate, fanning down and outward like a birdcage around her. Bone, like vines. Living and bending and moving past her shoulders, and as the bone tendrils reach the bottom of her legs, the thick glass wedge around her foot starts to branch off. Little glass nubs like sprouts grow up to the bones, reaching for them. Both of them, like plants reaching for the sun.

Yearning for each other.

Varia’s eyes suddenly widen, and her hands grow midnight up to her elbows in a split second. I don’t see the magic, but I see the aftermath—a cut hanging in the air between the glass and bone tendrils, separating them, shattering them. Bone splinters and glass splinters rain down. The bone choker shrinks rapidly, back to its normal size, and the glass wedge melts away into the grass like water, freeing her.

The princess looks up at me, haggard, her hair in sweat-soaked spates on her face, the dark circles around her serious eyes magnified as she tries so hard to hide her fear with a sudden gleam of deadly determination, the dark pressure of all her incredible magic pointed at me like claws.

“You. You did this. You’re trying to undo all of this, aren’t you?”

14

14

THE CHOICE