Page 214 of The Demon Tide

He nods as his fire whips passionately around me.

But Sparrow...he gave no mention of Sparrow. I wince, remembering how Vogel ordered her brought back West. Is she being brought back to Gardneria? Or was she destroyed in the explosion? A host of other anguished worries rise. “My brothers and family...”

“I saw Trystan before I left for you,” Yvan assures me. “The battle had turned—Naga’s horde and the Vu Trin were taking out Vogel’s remaining forces. It’s likely the Lupines survived, as well.”

I cling to the hope he’s offering. Yvan has never been one to turn away from painful realities. He reaches up to caress my shoulder, his fire aura blazing through mine, but it’s no longer anchored in my lines. The bittersweet pang cuts deep.

“Our bond...” I say. “It’s gone.” I search his eyes, freed not just from all fasting and Sealing bonds, but from him, as well.

“I know,” he says, a flaring pain in his fire aura that my own flame rushes out to echo. A more liquid heat enters his gaze. “What I can sense of your fire...it’s different now. Likegreen sunlight.” He reaches up to gently brush his fingertip along the edge of my ear. “And your ears...” His lips lift in a pained, affectionate smile. “They’re pointed. Like mine.”

I reach up to touch a point, marveling. “I feel...reborn.” I look to Sylvan, the fierce-eyed Dryad, to find him and the other Tree Fae watching Yvan and me with expressions of pure incredulity and, for a moment, I see Yvan and myself through their eyes.

The dread Black Witch and the revered Icaral of Prophecy, improbably both alive.

Embracing as staunch allies.

“I... I don’t understand what’s happened to me,” I say to Sylvan, the Dryadin language rolling off my tongue. It feels more natural on my lips than the Common Tongue ever did, an effortless breeze, the words the truer names for things. “Why am I so altered?” I ask. “And why can I suddenly speak your language?”

“Do you not know your own history, Mageling?” a resonant male voice sounds out, its odd vibration seeming to tug my lines straight down toward Erthia’s core.

I turn to find the pale, lime-hued Dryad I’ve named Darkness staring at me, his hood-shadowed dark eyes locked on to mine, all the colors of the world seeming to dim around him. I notice that he is the only one here who has black eyes instead of green, and that he lacks the others’ tree-imprinted armor.

I brush away my reflexive wariness of this Fae, desperate for answers. “I know Gardnerians have Dryad blood.” I reach up to touch my ear. “But...why am I so transformed?”

A slight smile forms on his lips, but it does nothing to dampen his aura of danger. On the contrary, it heightens it. Along with the way his black-clad form remains shadowed, even in dawn’s bright light.

“You were dormant,” he says, a hard edge to his words. “Like all Gardnerian Mages. Kept unrooted from the Forest.”

His biting words trigger a disturbance through the Dryads’ collective elemental power and I can tell from Yvan’s shuddering flame that he senses it too.

Vicious’s green glare turns incendiary. “You’re twisting things, Hazel!”

I tense my brow at Darkness—Hazel—in confusion. “What do you mean when you say ‘kept unrooted’?”

He narrows his midnight gaze and pins me in what feels like a thrall, everything around us fading and darkening, the sunlit world dimming. “Hundreds of years ago,” he seethes, “the Dryads shunned your people. They set their elemental power against the Mages to keep you dormant and cut off from the source of your lentulym.”

Lentulym. I instinctively understand this Dryad word—our affinity roots. The elemental lines inside me that I finally sense, now that I’m connected to the trees. And to III.

“Why would the Dryads cut us off from the Forest?” I ask, thrown as Yvan’s fingers thread reassuringly through mine.

“For the same reason the Kelts despised you,” Hazel rejoins. A jaded scowl twists his mouth. “Your blood isn’t ‘pure.’”

“That’snotthe reason!” Vicious growls.

Hazel bares sharp teeth at her, a bloodthirsty look entering his eyes that sends a chill racing down my back. “Itisthe reason,” he snarls. “The Kelts hated the Fae and the Fae hated the Kelts. So, when a few Kelts and Dryad Fae paired to create the Mages, those Mages were cast out byeveryone.Like the Death Fae were cast out.” His dark eyes remain fixed on Vicious, glinting with outrage. “Isn’t that true, Oaklyyn?”

Vicious’s name falls into place in my mind, her acorn-festooned hair and River Oak staff signifying a kinship with oak trees.

Oaklyyn’s look of sweltering ire turns scathing. “Our people were almostwipedoutby the Kelts. Or has that escaped your halfling memory?”

Hazel lurches toward her, his movement so fast it’s a blur, his eyes wild as he snaps suddenly elongated teeth at Oaklyyn and Sylvan thrusts his powerful frame between the two of them. Sylvan glares at Oaklyyn. “You overstep,” he says, voice shot through with warning.

I’m stunned by the exchange and the obvious fracture in their group.

Division. Yet again.

Hazel swings his penetrating black eyes back toward me, ferocity in them. “My mother was a primordial Fae. And primordials live avery longtime. She witnessed the casting out of the Mages. She was at the forest’s edge when the Mages massed there and begged the Dryads—begged them—for protection when the Kelts were slaughtering them and enslaving them.”

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