Page 141 of The Dryad Storm

“Youcan,” she insists, her mouth breaking into a heart-expanding smile. “You don’t have to be Dryad’kin to beDryad’khin. The Forest wants you too. It wantsallof us. I can feel the trees’ invitation swirling around you.”

Jules glances at the surrounding trees, a grimly serious look entering his eyes as he brings his gaze back to hers. “I’m a historian, Lu. And that has demanded...requiredthat I not align, to do any justice at all to my calling in this life.”

Love eddies through Lucretia, as well as a tight rush of respect for Jules’s fierce guarding of his own mind. Along with an appreciation of how it’s set him apart, kept him on an often-painful path of intense solitude, reading deep into the night by candlelight, stacks of history books surrounding him, delving into confusion over painful and brutal truths.

Then attempting to use all that conflicting knowledge to work for a more just world.

Foreveryone.

“I know it’s your calling, Jules,” she concedes as her water aura rushes around him in a potent stream. “But you can’t do it justice cut off from all this.” She motions toward the prism-edged Forest world around them. “It’snotan alignment in which you lose your free mind. It’s an opening up of the most important library there is on all of Erthia. All the archives. All the libraries. Every page you turn. They’re already supported bytrees.”

“Dead trees,” Jules reminds her, his expression unsettled as he peers closely at her.

“That’s true,” she concurs, pointedly glancing at the color-decorated trees, at the glorious, complex, miraculous tangle of Waters and Forest andLife. She breaks into a smile once more. “But now it’s time to enter the library that’sliving.”

Jules’s breath shudders through his throat as he blinks at her, his features tensing as he looks up toward the Forest’s canopy and then back at her.

“All right, Lu,” he concedes, his eyes taking on a fierce, intellectual light. “Bring me to your living library.”

Lucretia’s breath stills, the charged energy of the momentous shimmering in the mist around them. Pulse thrumming, she takes his hand and raises it, presses her lips gently to his palm and kisses its warm center.

Jules’s breath hitches as she takes her time, kissing every part of his hand before she meets his enamored gaze. “Place your palm to the tree, Jules.”

With their gazes locked, Jules draws his hand away from hers and brings it to the Noi Birch’s smooth, lavender bark.

A prismatic glow shivers to life around his hand. He pulls in a harsh breath and suddenly falls to his knees. Lucretia drops to her knees beside him, her magic swirling around him as Jules presses his forehead to the tree, a chromatic glow spreading around his form. Birch bark is suddenly forming around him and then drawing him inward until there’s nothing before Lucretia but the trunk.

Heart in her throat, Lucretia waits, her palms on the birch. Erthia seems to still on its axis, and Lucretia stills in turn. One heartbeat. Then another. And another. The pulse of the whole world slows as Lucretia closes her eyes andbreathes.

And then, after a time, it’s Jules’s warm shoulders under her palms instead of smooth trunk, and Lucretia opens her eyes and meets his awestruck gaze, an amber-lit late afternoon having descended.

Jules’s breath is coming in uneven gasps, a streak of deep green now running through his messy brown hair, his spectacles gone. A Noi Kestrel with silver feathers and bright-violet eyes is perched on his shoulder. Catching his breath, Jules lifts his palm, and the kestrel takes wing and alights on the branch just above them.

Lucretia’s heart swells.

There’s an image of III marked on Jules’s palm, identical to the one marked on her own.

“Where are your glasses?” Lucretia wonders.

Jules glances toward the kestrel. “The Forest merged my sight with my kindred’s.” He stops, blinking in obvious surprise over the Dryadin language flowing from his lips. “It wanted me to have a more expansive view. Ofeverything.” He pauses again, swallowing, seeming overcome, before a fierce determination lights his brown eyes. “A new history needs to be written,” he states, voice ragged. “Not centered on just one group of people or another.”

Lucretia waits, her heart fair bursting with an outflow of hope.

“The history we need right now,” he says, a revolutionary understanding in his eyes, “is a history of the Forest and the rest of the Natural World.” He shakes his head and huffs out a frustrated breath. “In all my years as a historian, I... I thought I was striving to remain impartial. But I was biased in the worst of ways. I missed the history at the center ofeverything.”

He looks to the III mark on his palm, face tense, as if in devastated apology.

“Then stop missing it,” Lucretia prods.

He sets his gaze back to hers. “Thisis why confusion was essential. Because none of the other historical points was ever at the true Center of things, although they alltried to be. It was all always... off-kilter.”

“Except when it was rooted in the Natural World,” Lucretia ventures.

He nods, holding her gaze. “And in the force of Love. For all of this. And for each other.” He stops for another moment, blinking at her, as if in awe. “Lu, I can sense your water power. This new link to the Forest... it’s opened up a stronger link toyou.”

On instinct, Lucretia takes his hand and presses their palms together, III mark to III mark. Both their eyes widen as Lucretia is filled with an intimate sense of a trace of her water magic flowing straight into him.

“You can feel all of it, can’t you,” she marvels, a thrill igniting and rippling through her every rootline.

---