Vicious jabs a finger toward Yvan. “You’re under some type of thrall, just like the Forest!” she snarls in the Common Tongue, and I’m surprised by her use of my language. She sweeps her glare over the other Dryads. “She is the Black Witch of the trees’ foretelling! Her people...they’re destroying ours!” She knifes her gaze at Pine. “Sylvan, we need to slay her now!”

“I’m on your side,” I insist as the Great Tree’s acceptance flows out in an embracing wave. Vicious looks to III in astonishment, as if she, too, sensed it.

Sylvan points at the Great Tree’s black trunk, his gaze fixing on Vicious. “III has rooted her.” He pivots to me, eyes blazing. “Show her your palm.”

Confused, I slide the branch in my wand hand through my tunic’s belt and splay out my palm, my breath catching as I take in the image now fused to my forest green skin.

It’s an image of III. Identical to the image marked on all their palms.

Stunned, I look back at Sylvan.

“We will not kill you, Black Witch,” he says, his voice deepening with finality. “Like us, you are part of the Forest now. III has named you Guardian.

CHAPTER SIX

THE EXPANDING CIRCLE

Elloren

Northern Forest

I glance down at the image of III on my palm, my skin’s verdant shimmer gleaming in the bright dawn sunlight. Yvan draws nearer, his molten aura sweeping around us.

“I feel like I’m meeting you for the first time,” he says.

Tears mist my eyes as III’s strengthening power flows into me. “I feel like I’m meeting myself for the first time.” I pause, choked up to be here, alive, with him. Alive with the Forest. “I thought...” I manage as the tears slide down my cheeks. “I thought it was over for me.”

“No, not over,” Yvan says roughly as he pulls me into a close embrace and I embrace him in turn, breaking into sobs against the hot skin of his shoulder.

“Lukas is dead,” I rasp out, clutching Yvan as his wings arc inward to enfold us both.

“I know,” he says against my hair in a shattered voice. “I’m sorry, Elloren.”

And I can feel it in his fire’s discordant flare, that he was able to sense Lukas’s full sacrifice that moment on the river. That he knows that Lukas gave his life not just for me, but for the entire Realm. And for Yvan too.

I draw back, clutching his muscular arms. He’s so incredibly alive beneath my palms, his fire shivering around me with ardent force. “How did you find me?”

He pulls in a breath and lets it out, streaming a pulse of his fire aura toward me, the edge streaked with vermilion flame.

“Raz’zor,” I murmur in a flash of understanding.