My hand drifts to the thorn crown upon my head and I look up at the ceiling. Everyone has been so secretive about the High Tower. What is it? But the one time I’d tried the door, it was locked. Kel told me that place was strictly forbidden.
I stand and pace the length of my room. What are they hiding that could be any worse than the curse itself? After all we’ve been through these last few months, they trust me.
I know it.
But… Caspian’s words linger in my mind, a ghost shivering through my skin.
What is in the High Tower?
I go to the windowsill and take another look at the sun. They’re still not back. And I can’t do anything here waiting for them.
Time to take my destiny into my own hands.
I close my eyes, and feel a deep knowing, a visceral thing I’ve sensed since living in Castletree. There’s something more to this castle, to these thorns. They canhearme.
“Show me the way to High Tower,” I whisper. “Show me the path.”
A groan shudders behind me, and I turn to the cherry blossom tree in the corner of my room. The trunk, overgrown with briars and purple thorns, cracks open. The thorns retreat, the bark lifts, and the pink petals shiver to the ground.
Where once my cherry blossom tree had been is now a narrow staircase. A path up into the chasms of Castletree.
“Trust myself,” I whisper. And like a tether is tied to my heart, I glide up into the dark.
The staircase is pitch black and winds around and around and around. I’m heading straight through the heart of the tree, and up to the tallest branches. It’s like I can feel the pulse of magic from within.
A sense of something very sacred and very ancient.
Each step is deliberate, and I swear my heart beats with the same thrumming magic. There are briars in the stairway, but not so encompassing as elsewhere. Instead, a single branch of thorns winds around the walls on either side, almost serving as a railing as I ascend through the dark.
Finally, I reach a wooden door. I turn the handle and step into the top of High Tower.
Blinking, I take in the large chamber. Huge stained-glass windows let in the fading light and paint the room in brilliant red and blue and orange and green. And the briars…
No other area of the castle, not even the Winter Wing, is so infested with them. They lay like a carpet over the floor, tugging at my dress. Up, up, up the walls they stretch, tangling at the precipice of the ceiling. It’s as if they are the skeleton of Castletree itself.
My breath catches. In the very middle of the chamber lies a crescent shape where no briars dare touch. The floor is tiled in a vibrant mural of a starfall: shimmering lights descending from the heavens. And four roses grow from a small patch of rich earth.
One has pink petals and is shrouded in emerald light from the stained-glass window. Beside it grows one of turquoise petals, bathed in yellow light. Next to that is one of brilliant orange, the glass dusting it in dark red. And finally, there is a startingly blue rose, a color so potent I feel like I may freeze if I touch it.
And the roses are wilting.
I fall to my hands and knees, the magic radiating from the roses washing over me like a tidal wave.
The roses look as if they’re barely hanging onto life. The petals are wrinkled, leaves drooping. A precious blue petal falls from the one on the end and withers to ash upon the ground.
“What does this mean?” I say. “What are you trying to show me?”
And as if Castletree hears my plea, light from the stained-glass windows sparkles andmoves.It twists together, swirling and arcing, a rainbow of luminous color, until it forms an image.
I gasp. Standing before me are… my princes.
I know it’s them, even though they’re bare images made of light. Ezryn standing behind his flower, his hand clasped on a sword. Dayton, his hair shorter but his smile the same. Farron, shrunken and timid. And Keldarion, his hair a white tangle upon his head, a feral grimace on his face.
They’re looking at me.
No, not me. Something behind me. Someone.
I turn to see the silhouette of a woman made of dusky gray light. Her shape shimmers forward through my body and she stands before the princes. She holds out four roses. Each one glimmers as if made of its own prism.