Infinity

“Yeah?” She looked up at me.

“Are you—” I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t ask if she was okay because none of us were okay. There was no way to be okay anymore; I didn’t know if we ever would be again.

“There’s nothing.” She rubbed her forehead back and forth against the blackened bark and didn’t look at me, letting her hands cord through the grass underneath her fingers, taking it from parched and wilted to a vibrant green with nothing more than a touch.

“I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s nothing there, in my mind. Before, there was always this, this knowing feeling at the back of my skull.” Mercedes pulled her fingers from the grass, and it withered again.

“A feeling? You mean like telepathy or something?”

“I couldn’t read the other dryads minds—I didn’t want to read their minds—but I knew they were there, that they existed. We were linked together, and we could touch everything, anything that was alive was open to us, its thoughts, its feelings, and the things that made it sing.”

“And now?”

“Now there’s nothing. There’s emptiness in my mind. I’m alone in my own thoughts, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“We’ll figure it out.” I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and squeezed her to my side. “I don’t know how we’ll figure it out, but we will. Maybe there are dryads across the border. Once the invasion is over—”

“No.” She pulled away from me, and I could see tears running down her cheeks.

“Mer—”

“No. I don’t want to bond with another tribe over the border in Bathune. I don’t want to give up my connection with my tree. This is my home, and they were”—she let out a small sob—“they were my second chance at a family.”

“I know.” I looked down at my own hands, helplessly clasped together in my lap, unsure what to say. A new family—that’s what we’d made here in Nerissette. Mercedes, Winston, Rhys, Timbago, John, Talia, the dryads, and all the rest of the people of Nerissette. We’d made ourselves a family, and now outsiders were trying to tear us apart. They were picking us off one by one.

“I don’t know what to do. I mean, I thought we were safe with the Fate Maker gone. I thought we were finally going to get a chance to just, I don’t know what… But whatever we were going to become, it was supposed to be better than this.”

“It will be better.” I rested my head against her shoulder, taking comfort from the way her tree warmed in my presence. “I’m going to make it right.”

“How?”

“We’re raising an army, and when they’re ready, I’m taking them over the mountains to confront my aunt face-to-face. I promise, I won’t let anyone ever hurt you again. I can’t help Darinda and the rest of your sisters, but I promise you, Bavasama will never hurt anyone else that way. I’ll kill her before I let do that again.”

“You can’t kill them all. You can’t destroy an entire kingdom over me.”

“Why? Why can’t I do the same thing to them that they’ve been doing to us since we got here?”

“Because we aren’t them, and we can’t become them, either. We shouldn’t want to become them. You weren’t there. You didn’t see them. You didn’t see what they were like.”

“Winston and I found Bavasama’s soldiers when we were looking for you. I saw her men in the mountains, hurrying across the border, trying to escape.”

“In the forest.” She turned to look at me. “You didn’t see them in the forest, Al. They were laughing. They had us trapped, and all they could do was laugh and point. How evil do you have to be to know you’re going to kill people and laugh at them first? To them we weren’t even real. We were things. Animals.”

“You’re not an animal!”

“No, I’m not. I’m Mercedes Garcia, second daughter of Joseph and Rosalie Garcia, last Sapling of the Dryad Order of Nerissette. I’m best friends with a queen, I once dyed my hair green on accident, and I used to get my term papers on famous Olympians for gym class by copying from Wikipedia because I knew Coach Wilkie wouldn’t catch on.”

“I know you’re—”

“I’m not an animal,” she said forcefully, “but today—in that clearing—all I was to them was a creature they’d been sent to hunt down. You can’t do that, Allie. You can’t become the type of person who’s so twisted inside that you can do those sorts of things. We can’t become those people. You want to know why?”

“Why?” I muttered.

“Because I refuse to be the type of monster that rounds up strangers and kills them for no reason, laughing the entire time, and I refuse to let you become that type of person, either. You’re my best friend, and I won’t lose you to that kind of darkness. I don’t care if you are a queen, you’re my best friend first, and it’s my job to protect you from that.”

“What are we supposed to do then? Wait for them to invade us? Hope that they decide to stop killing people? That we’ll be safe somehow?”

“No. We can’t be those people, either. We can’t pretend that we don’t see what’s coming. That would be worse because then it would be our people who were murdered in the meantime. We can’t pretend that nothing bad is ever going to happen. We just have to go out and meet it, and when we’re face-to-face with it, we have to be brave enough to be better than they are.”

“You think that’s going to win us a war? Being good? Being merciful toward our enemies?” I sniffled, feeling tears prickling at the back of my eyes.

“Aquella told me today that the Nymphiad can no longer sit back and watch as the world burns. We have to go out and face evil so that we can stop it, but the only way we could do that was if we didn’t become evil ourselves in the process.”

“What did Boreas say?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head silently. “He didn’t say anything at all.”

“So what am I supposed to do then? March the army to the border and then sit there? To lay siege to her border and just wait again?”

“No.” Mercedes lifted her head from the bark and stared, her silver eyes piercing me. “No siege. Take the army to Bavasama. March across the border and take the army directly to the Palace of Night. Tell her we’re not going to put up with her crap anymore, and if she doesn’t knock it off, you’ve got an army to stop her. A big army, full of lots of very angry soldiers.”

“Okay, how’s that different from my plan?”

“Before you give the order to attack the Palace of Night, give her the chance to surrender. No matter how angry she makes you, Allie, give her the chance to surrender to you peacefully. Make her give up her crown, if you want. Put her in her own dungeons. But before you attack, give her a chance to save her soldiers’ lives.”

“She won’t.”

“That doesn’t matter.” Mercedes grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze. “You’re not giving her the chance because she’ll take it. You’re the queen who holds the Great Relics of Nerissette. You can afford to be merciful. And if that’s not enough, give her the chance because it’s who you are.”

“I don’t know who I am anymore.” I leaned my head against her shoulder and tried not to cry. Sure, I was able to destroy the Mirror that gave a direct path into the World That Is, and I used the Dragon’s Tear to trap the Fate Maker in the Bleak—things that couldn’t happen if I weren’t the rightful queen—but that was just a title.

“You’re my best friend, who also happens to be a queen.”

“I’m not a very good queen, though, am I? Ever since I took the throne, all anyone has done is try to overthrow me somehow.”

“So what?” Mercedes bumped her shoulder against mine. “I’m green. Nothing you can come up with will ever top that. According to Dryad legends, I’m part plant. So take your whole, ‘poor me, everyone keeps invading my kingdom, and my boyfriend turns into a big, gorgeous dragon to protect me’ and stuff it. I’m a plant woman. You can’t beat me in the freakstakes after that.”

“Well, at least you’re a pretty shade of green,” I said, nudging her shoulder. “Sort of a minty color.”

“Spring leaf,” she corrected. “I am spring-leaf green.”

“Whatever, at least you’re not the color of pond scum.”