“So what do we do now?” Mercedes asked as she sat up beside me and pushed her own hair back.
“We find our way to Dramera. Wait for Rhys and the army to get here. Save the kingdom, and find a way to get you, and anyone else who wants to go, back home.” I grabbed her hand.
“Together.” Mercedes tightened her grip on my hand. “No matter what, we’re going together. You are my best friend, and I don’t care if I have to drag you through that portal, I’m not leaving you behind.”
I pushed myself up, all the muscles in my legs and back aching, and reached, hoisting her up to stand beside me. “We’ll see.” I didn’t want to fight with her right now about the fact that I wasn’t going back to the World That Is, even if she did. I couldn’t. My place was here now.
“We’ll find a way home, Allie.” She squeezed my hand. “We have to.”
“Come on. Let’s get back to Dramera.” I tugged her along behind me as I started in the direction of the dragon stronghold, not meeting her eyes.
“Hiking and tree climbing?” Mercedes asked. “This day is getting better and better by the minute.”
“Well—” A branch snapped and we froze. Another branch snapped and I turned to look at Mercedes and saw that her eyes were wide, her pupils dilated. My stomach started to roll and all I wanted to do was vomit. But I swallowed and tried to clamp down on the terror that was racing through me.
“Come on.” Mercedes pulled me toward another tree and brushed her fingers against it. “Take me home. Please, all I want to do is go home. Back home we’ll be safe.”
“What?” I asked as a branch reached out to grab me. The next thing I could see was smoke. Lots and lots of smoke, and all I could think as the smoke filled my lungs and the tree tightened its grip on me was, this can’t be good.
Chapter Sixteen
We spun through a cloud of smoke that felt way too much like the one that had brought us to Nerissette in the first place, and I flung my hand out for Mercedes. Wherever this tree was taking us I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to end up there by myself. Mercedes grabbed my hand tight in hers, and before I knew what was going on, the smoke opened up and dropped us onto the hard ground below. My ribs ached and bruises were already starting to form on my back from the beating I’d taken today, thanks to all the helpful magic I’d been forced to endure.
Peeling my eyes open slowly, I looked up and saw blue sky and fluffy white clouds floating over my head. One of them sort of looked like a bunny holding a spear and attacking an ogre. Or it could have just been a random shape. It all depended on how you turned your head. Right now I was definitely rooting for the bunny.
“Mercedes.” I coughed from all the smoke still trapped in my lungs. “Where are we?”
“Back at the castle,” Mercedes said quietly. “We ended up back at your stupid, ridiculous, burning palace.”
“Why?” I coughed again.
“I was hoping that it would work in reverse.” Mercedes sat up beside me, and I struggled to follow her train of thought.
“What would work in reverse?” I turned to her and froze as I saw the palace, my palace, or the smoking ruins of what had once been my palace, burning behind her.
The glass dome that had just been replaced was shattered again, looking like the open mouth of a giant glass creature with really bad teeth, and the remaining white marble was blackened and crumbling in uneven columns, showing the utter destruction beyond.
I turned to look at the rest of the palace grounds and felt tears prickling at the back of my eyes. Everything was destroyed. The grass was black with soot and there were huge ditches scored into the ground, gaping wounds along the body of the land the palace sat upon. The only thing still standing was a large, silver-leafed tree with black scorch marks wrapped along the trunk—the Silver Leaf Tree. The Tree of Life. Mercedes’s tree.
“I don’t understand,” Mercedes said. Her eyes were wide with shock, and tears ran down her cheeks. She reached up to swipe at them and then slammed her fists against the patch of ground that we were sitting on.
Immediately I saw the grass begin to fade from black to a pale gray and then transform to a light green that darkened until it was the color of a four-leaf clover. “Mercedes?”
“How could it not have worked?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” I watched as she slammed her fists down again, and the color bled from one blade of grass to another as if her energy was healing the land around her. “What were you trying to do?”
“I was trying to take us home!” Her shoulders sagged in disappointment. “Dryads can use the trees as portals, like you use the runes in the palace. We can travel from one part of Nerissette to another by using the trees. If you already know where you’re going and can visualize the place, the trees can take you there. And I wanted to go home.”
“But…” My heart broke at the fact that she had been so desperate to get home that she’d been willing to leave Winston and all the rest of our friends behind while she made her escape.
“According to all of the other dryads it only works inside Nerissette. They’ve never been able to use the portals to travel anywhere else. Not even the Borderlands. Only, the thing is, I realized that none of Nerissette’s dryads have ever been to the Borderlands. They can’t visualize it. So I thought it could be that—”
“The reason they can’t transport anywhere else isn’t that the trees are incapable of transporting them but that they can’t manage to visualize where they want to be enough to control the magic?” I sighed as my brain tried to wrap itself around what I’m pretty sure was more than one violation of basic science.
“Exactly.” Mercedes pushed herself up to stand.
“And you thought if you asked the portal to take us home that it could break through the wall between this world and ours? Oh, Mer.” I shook my head at her, disappointed.
“I thought it was worth the chance, but instead of taking us there the stupid tree got confused and brought us here.”
“I don’t think it got confused at all.” I grabbed her shoulders and turned her to face her tree. “You asked the magic to bring you home, and it did. It brought you back to the tree you claimed as your own.”
“I only claimed it temporarily. Just until we go home. Besides, this isn’t what I wanted. This isn’t where we’re supposed to be.” She crossed her arms over her chest and narrowed her eyes at the silver tree standing tall and more than a little proud in the distance, giving off an air of annoyed indifference at the world around it.
“When has the magic of Nerissette given any of us what we wanted? Especially when it thinks we need something different?”
“But what could we need that’s here? Winston had the dragons burn the Crystal Palace to the ground to keep your aunt and the Fate Maker from taking control of it and the Fate Maker destroyed everything else that wasn’t in flames. There’s nothing here to find.”
“I don’t know.” I rubbed my right hand over my left arm nervously as I glanced around, searching for someone, anyone. If only Winston were here, he’d know what to do. He’d keep his head and he’d be able to think our way out of this. “I don’t know why we’re here.”
“So what should we do?” Mercedes asked.
“We search the castle,” I said as I pushed myself to my feet. “Maybe there are still people here. Timbago or some of the rest of the staff.”
“And what is Timbago going to tell us?”
“I don’t know. But he knows more than almost anyone else, and we have to be here for a reason.”