Eliana smiled grimly as she crept into the corridor, past Jessamyn’s frowning figure. For weeks, we’ve been working together. My mind is stronger than it’s ever been. We can talk without him noticing. You can hide me for, what, five hours now, as I move about the palace?

That’s true, the Prophet said, thoughts carefully blank.

Eliana turned a corner, hurried unseen past a patrolling pair of guards. You made me drop that knife for a reason, all those weeks ago. I think I deserve to know it. What is the purpose of this work we’ve been doing? Is it merely a diversion to pass the time?

Not a diversion.

Then what?

The silence continued.

Eliana darted like a shadow across the palace’s second floor, the strange memory of her dream guiding her through a maze of tiled rooms and curtained hallways until she emerged at last into a soft world of green.

It was a vast courtyard, as large as one of Corien’s grandest ballrooms. Walls heaped with flowers, vines spilling down iron trellises, bushes painted bright with berries. Rows of red blooms, oiled wooden tables of seedlings growing roots in glass vials. Enormous shivering ferns, glossy-leaved trees heavy with fruit. Eliana looked up at a ceiling of colored glass. Crimson and gold panes. Vents open to let in the nighttime air.

She cradled the nearest red flower in her hands, caught the familiar sweet scent from her rooms. So this is where he grows these flowers.

The Prophet felt tense and a little befuddled. Your dream showed you this?

Yes, this exactly. Every last detail. And…over here. It showed me this too.

She crawled beneath the seedling tables and disappeared into the courtyard’s thick green gloom. It was absurd, what she was doing, as if she were playing a child’s game. But a strange tension bloomed in her chest, tugging her on, and she had to follow it or she would burst. A strange vibration rattled her teeth, and she remembered forging her castings, plunging her hands into Remy’s wound. This felt the same—the same vitality, the same urgent thread of power growing taut and golden inside her bones.

I think it’s the empirium, she thought. I think it’s trying to show me something.

A slight ripple of alarm from the Prophet. Why do you say that?

Eliana pushed past a tangle of vines. She was deep in the courtyard now, a thick silence all around her. Moss soft under her hands and the air green in her lungs.

Then she saw it, the place from her dream—a tiny dark thicket formed of joined ferns and vines, bordered by the roots of a flowering tree with weeping branches and rough black bark. Hardly large enough for her to curl up in, and yet she pushed her way through the wild growth until she sat hunched in the middle of it, shivering.

“The air feels thin here,” she whispered, slowly moving her fingers through it. “Like I could push it aside and find something else behind it.”

The Prophet had grown very quiet. Would you like to try?

Yes, Eliana replied, trembling. Her castings warmed against her skin. But I don’t think I can.

Maybe something small, first. Something natural. Not a candlestick, but a tree. Can you coax its roots from the earth?

Eliana tried, her skin soon slick with sweat. The roots remained wedged in the black soil, but the air changed, vitalized with a humming hot charge. Eliana reached out with her power, guiding it to hold on to the feeling. The world buzzed with heat, as did her skin, and she felt herself lifting up off the ground to follow the air’s new current.

Then she lost her grip and sank back to the dirt, exhausted and cold. Castings dark, head aching.

You’re doing so well, little one, said the Prophet, and Eliana clung to the warmth of those words.

They returned to the garden again and again, and each time Eliana crept on her hands and knees into her quiet, dark thicket, she felt a tiny piece of her old strength return to her. It was slow progress, for Corien’s punishments continued, even more vicious than before. He could sense the change in her but couldn’t discover its source, and he threw his fury at her with his fists and his mind. After these torments, body and mind battered, Eliana moved slowly, and her thoughts were sometimes too scattered to focus properly.

Some nights, she could not move from her bed at all, and the Prophet simply comforted her, whispering words Eliana’s sluggish mind couldn’t understand, sending the illusion of soft hands on her back.

Once, Corien spent twenty hours straight in her mind, searching through its every crevice for the answer to what was happening, somehow, right beneath his nose. And Eliana lost all sense of pride and self as those jagged spikes of pain split open her skull. She sobbed on the floor, twisting and jerking in Corien’s grip, and mired in that black agony, the only word she could summon was Simon.

She screamed it over and over, reaching for the door as if he stood just beyond it. If she screamed loudly enough, he would come for her. If she begged him, he would save her.

And then the door did open, and Simon strode toward her, picked her up from the floor, brushed his lips against her forehead. She knew he was not there. Corien’s wicked glee carved down her back like an ax’s blade. And yet Simon felt so real, so familiar, that she pressed her face against his chest and clung to him.

He brought her to the little bed at Willow, underneath the slanted ceiling. The glowing brazier in the corner, the rain pattering against the windows. Safe in his arms, warm in their bed, she allowed herself a moment to enjoy the lie.

Then she wrenched herself away, kicked him when he reached for her, scooped hot coals from the brazier and flung them at his face.

Blackness, then, and Corien’s voice mocking her as she fell.

For days, she tossed in the grip of cackling dreams, and when she next woke, her rooms were hushed.

She sat up, donned one of her nightgowns, walked unsteadily toward the door.

I’m so sorry, little one, the Prophet said, their voice thick with anguish. If I could take all of this from you, I would.

I don’t need your apologies, Eliana said sharply. I need you to hide me.

And in the garden, wrapped in the Prophet’s fierce cloak, Eliana cracked open the earth and pulled roots from it with only her power. She reached for the air, used it to push a path clear through the ferns, deeper into the garden. Delving down into the soil, she coaxed up water until it pooled around her in cool gurgling puddles.

Her castings glowed faintly, washing the thicket in pale gold.

He tries to break you, the Prophet said, voice warm with pride, and he fails utterly. Well done.

Simon’s echo whispered through her hair. Eliana shook it free, set her jaw.

I’d like to try something new, she thought. Ribbons of pale light streamed unbroken through her veins. Her power mirrored the new strength of her mind. They were connected, her mind and her body, and they in turn were connected to the water at her toes, and the roots she tucked back down into the earth so the tree could drink.