Page 167 of The Dryad Storm

I wince, a tear escaping my eye.

“Yet, knowing all of that,” Yvan says in a strangled voice, eyes burning, “you’d choose him again?”

Soleiya breaks down now, sobbing. “Yes, Yvan...” she roughly sputters. She closes her eyes tight, then opens them, tear glassed, her voice a defiant snarl when it comes. “I’d choose your fatheragain and again and again and again.”

And then her aura implodes, her shoulders slumping as she weeps, her body quivering.

Yvan’s invisible fire blazes out to her, circling her in an embrace as he steps forward and brings a hand gently to her shoulder. “That’s what love is, Mav’ya,” he says in Lasair, his tone rife with feeling. “A wide-open heart. Wide open to the loveandthe pain.”

After a long moment, Soleiya meets Yvan’s gaze and brings her hand to his angular cheek, her lips trembling, her fire reaching out tentatively to his. Yvan meets her flame without hesitation, flowing a graceful tendril of fire around his mother’s power, his own tears falling.

Soleiya pulls in a shuddering breath, her angular face tightening with emotion. “How did you get to be so wise, my son?”

An incredulous laugh escapes Yvan, his tear-slicked mouth lifting into a wrysmile. “Maybe growing up an Icaral in a Realm that hates me?” He loses the jaded look, his expression growing earnest, his form a prism through my own tears as he sends out an invisible, ardent embrace of flame to encircle me. “But then, I met Elloren. And I learned, along with her, that there’s another way. Beyond all the rigid lines. And then... I joined with the Forest, and found out that I don’t have to be this... thisforce of destruction. This ‘Icaral of Prophecy’ weapon. That there’s another path for me. Another path for usall.” The flow of his fire around her flares with insistent, loving might. “Join with us, Mav’ya. This path holds ouronlychance to save Erthia and defeat the Shadow.”

There’s a prolonged beat of hesitation as Soleiya turns and registers my presence inside the Forest, a startled blaze of conflict igniting through her aura, her power whipping up to tempestuous levels before she sets her sights back on Yvan with a look of outrage.

“Please, Mav’ya,’ Yvan urges, holding firm. “Please, justhear the Forest out.”

Soleiya holds his gaze for an excruciatingly long moment. “All right, my son,” she finally concedes. She casts me a look of hatred before turning back to Yvan, her expression tortured. “I’ll listen to your Forest.”

Yvan pulls in a deep breath, then takes his mother’s hand and leads her to a large oak. Gently, he lifts her palm to the bark, and I’ve a sudden sense of the entire Dyoi Forest pulling in a breath as its power abruptly contracts toward Soleiya.

Soleiya gasps, her hand taking on a prismatic glow. Then, just as it happened for the others, bark swiftly forms over Soleiya’s body, and she’s pulled straight into the tree.

Yvan lets out a harsh sound, both his palms on the tree now.

My heart in my throat, I step from the tree line and swiftly close the distance between us. I bring my hand to Yvan’s hot shoulder, and his fire immediately flares and flashes around and through me in impassioned strokes.

“I’m sorry, Elloren,” he grits out. “I’m sorry you have to endure so much hatred.”

“Yvan,” I warn, “Fallon Bane and Vogel were briefly just outside our shielding.”

Yvan’s palms drop from the tree as he turns to face me in an urgent blur. “What happened?”

“They seemed to portal out as quickly as they came,” I answer. “Alder and I read a message from the Forests of the continent’s South, sent out as those wilds were destroyed. Fallon has leveled both Northern and Southern Ishkartaan with her ice. Yvan, she’s now capable of a Black Witch level of Shadow ice power. She’s thrown aline of her ice into Vogel’s Shadow net over our shielding. Which will hasten winter. We need every last person under this dome on our sidetonight.”

Yvan casts me a fervid look before glancing at the trunk Soleiya just entered, a frustrated look sharpening his features. “My mother’s as stubborn as me.”

“Well, we can only hope the Forest gets through to her.”

I tell him about Or’myr’s line of purple moons as we wait for what feels like an unbearable stretch of time. Eventually, rays of prismatic light blast from the trunk, and Yvan and I step back, his mother suddenly before us, down on her knees and panting, her palms to the ground.

“Mav’ya?” Yvan says, dropping down to her level and reaching out to take hold of her arm.

Soleiya lifts her head, and I pull in an astonished breath.

Her eyes are filled with purple fire. She unfurls her clenched hand to reveal a dark violet pinecone, the image of III marked on her palm just beneath it, and I can sense it thrumming through her—Soleiya’s new bond to Yvan’s kindred Zhilaan Forest.

The Forest that needs fire.

“It’s... it’s all more complex and interconnected than I ever realized,” Soleiya stammers, her awestruck face slicked with tears as she stares, wide-eyed, at the pinecone and III mark on her palm. She lifts her gaze to me, her brow knotting as more tears pool and streak down her face. “The trees... they showed me what you’ve both been through. And, Elloren... they showed me your heart, and what Vogel tried to do to you. They showed meeverything...” Her words trail off as her face tenses with obvious remorse. “I’mso sorry.”

My throat tenses with emotion as Yvan huffs out a relieved breath and Soleiya rises. I draw her into a close embrace, her lips trembling along with her voice when she draws slightly back. “Perhaps... we can start over, you and I?”

I nod with enthusiasm and urgency, Yvan’s wings arcing in around us both as his fire lashes around us, the three of us no longer divided as Icaral, Fire Fae, and Mage.

All of us now Forest’khin.

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