“It wasn’t like this before,” Ash murmured behind me. I gazed at the dying tree and felt an incomprehensible sadness, as if I were seeing an old friend about to die. Shaking it off, I looked around for a doorway or gate, but the tree was the only thing here.
“Will it still work?” I wondered as he urged the horse into the clearing, toward the ancient tree. “The trod, I mean. Will it open?”
“We’ll see.” Ash dismounted and led the horse up to the trunk. When it stopped, I slid out of the saddle and joined him.
“So, how does the trod work?” I asked, peering at the trunk for a door of some kind. Doors in trees were not unusual in the Nevernever. In fact, during my first time to Faeryland, I’d spent the night in a wood sprite’s tree, somehow shrinking down to the size of a bug to fit through his door. “I don’t see a gate. How do you get it to open?”
“Easy,” Ash replied. “We just ask.”
Ignoring my scowl, he faced the trunk and put a hand on the rough bark. “This is Ash,” he said clearly, “third son of the Unseelie Court, requesting passage to the mortal realm and the clearing of the Elder.”
“Please,” I added.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, with a loud groaning and creaking, one of the massive roots snaked out of the ground, shedding dirt and twigs. Rising into the air, it formed an archway between itself and the ground, and the space between shimmered with magic.
“There’s your trod,” Ash murmured, as my heart beat faster in my chest. Puck was through that gateway. If he was still alive.
Clutching Ash’s hand, almost pulling him along in my impatience, I ducked through the arch.
I tripped over a root on the other side and stumbled forward, barely catching myself. Straightening, I gazed around the moonlit grove of New Orleans City Park, recognizing the huge mossy oaks from our last visit. The air was humid, warm and peaceful. Crickets buzzed, leaves rustled and moonlight shimmered off the nearby lake. Nothing had changed. It had been this peaceful the last time we were here, though my world had been falling apart.
Ash touched my arm and nodded at a tree, where a willowy girl with moss-green skin watched us from the shadow of an oak, her dark eyes wide and startled.
“Meghan Chase?” The dryad swayed toward us, moving like a wind-blown branch. “What are you doing here?” I blinked at the fear in her voice. “You must not stay!” she hissed as she drew close. “It is not safe. There is something dangerous following you.”
“We know,” Ash said beside me, calm and unflustered as always. The dryad blinked and shifted her gaze to him. “But we came through the Elder gate, so hopefully she won’t let whatever is hunting us into this world.”
Elder gate? I glanced behind me, and my stomach twisted so hard I felt nauseous.
It was the Elder Dryad’s tree, the great oak that once stood tall and proud, looming over the others. Now, like its twin in the clearing, it was dying. Its branches were bare of leaves, the shaggy moss that covered it brown and dead.
A lump rose to my throat. I remembered the Elder Dryad from our first visit here: an old, grandmotherly fey with a soft voice and kind eyes who had given the very heart of her tree to make sure I could rescue my brother. And kill the faery who’d kidnapped him. The Elder had known she would die if she helped me. But she gave us the weapon we needed to take down the enemy fey and get Ethan back.
The dryad girl stepped beside me, gazing at the dying oak. “She lives still,” she murmured, her voice like the whisper of leaves. “Dying, yes. Too weak to leave her tree, she sleeps now, dreaming of her youth. But not gone, not yet. It will take a long time for her to fade completely.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
“No, Meghan Chase.” The dryad shook her head with a faint rustling sound, and a shiny beetle crawled across her face to burrow into her hair. “She knew. She knew all along what was going to happen. The wind tells us these things. Just as it tells us you are in terrible danger now.” She suddenly fixed me with piercing black eyes. “You should not be here,” she said firmly. “It is very close. Why have you come?”
My skin prickled, but I shook off the feeling of trepidation and held her gaze. “I’m here for Puck. I need to see him.”
The dryad’s expression softened. “Ah. Yes, of course. I will take you to him, but I fear you will be disappointed.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I felt cold, even in the warm summer night. “I just want to see him.”
The dryad nodded and shuffled back, swaying in the breeze. “This way.”
Chapter Two
The Heart of the Oak
Puck, or the infamous Robin Goodfellow, as he was known in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, had another name, once. A human name, belonging to a lanky, red-haired boy, who had been the neighbor of a shy farm girl in the Louisiana bayou. Robbie Goodfell, as he called himself back then, had been my classmate, confidant and best friend. Always looking out for me, like an older brother. Goofy, sarcastic and somewhat overprotective, Robbie was…different. When he wasn’t around, people barely remembered him, who he was, what he looked like. It was like he simply faded from their memories, despite the fact that whenever anything went wrong in school—mice in desks, superglue on chairs, an alligator in the bathrooms one day—Robbie was somehow involved. No one ever suspected him, but I always knew.
Still, it came as a shock when I discovered who he really was: King Oberon’s servant, charged with keeping an eye on me in the mortal world. To keep me safe from those who would harm a half-human daughter of Oberon. But also, to keep me blind to the world of Faery, ignorant and unaware of my true nature, and all the danger that came with it.
When Ethan was kidnapped and taken into the Nevernever, Robbie’s plans to keep me blind and ignorant unraveled. Defying Oberon’s direct orders, he agreed to help me rescue my brother, but his loyalty came at a huge cost. During a battle with an Iron faery, a brand-new species of fey born from technology and progress, he was shot and very nearly killed. Ash and I brought him here, to City Park, and the dryads took him into one of their trees to sleep and heal from his wounds. Suspended in stasis, the dryads kept him alive, but they didn’t know when he would wake up. If he woke up at all. We had to leave him behind when we left to rescue Ethan, and the guilt of that decision had haunted me ever since.
I pressed my palm against the mossy trunk, wondering if I could feel his heartbeat within the tree, a vibration, a sigh. Something, anything, that told me he was still there. But I felt nothing except sap, moss and the rough edges of the bark. Puck, if he still lived, was far from my reach.
“Are you sure he’s in there?” I asked the dryad, not taking my eyes from the trunk. I didn’t know what to expect: his head to pop out of the wood and grin at me, perhaps? But I felt that if I took my eyes away for a second, I would miss something.
The dryad girl nodded. “Yes. He lives still. Nothing has changed. Robin Goodfellow sleeps his dreamless slumber, waiting for the day he will rejoin the world.”
“When will that be?” I asked, running my fingers down the trunk.
“We do not know. Perhaps days. Perhaps centuries. Perhaps he does not want to wake up.” The dryad placed her hand on the trunk and closed her eyes. “He is resting comfortably, in no pain. There is nothing you can do for him but wait, and be patient.”
Unsatisfied with her answer, I pressed my palm against the tree and closed my eyes. Summer glamour swirled around me, the magic of my father Oberon and the Summer court, the glamour of heat and earth and living things. I prodded the tree gently, feeling the sun-warmed leaves and the life running through their emerald veins. I felt thousands of tiny insects swarming over and burrowing into the trunk, the rapid heartbeat of birds, dreaming in the branches.