There was a rumble overhead and a rush of cold wind, and the clouds broke open. Fat raindrops swept across the ring of devastation.
The world narrowed to the cold splatter of rain, the slick ridges of wet bark, and the hypnotic sway of those dark purple leaves. Distantly, Sepha noted an unaccountable sizzle and pop, a wave of nausea that sent acid to the back of her mouth. The far-off, frantic sound of a man shouting. Her limbs lit up as adrenaline rushed through them—but why should they? She was only walking toward a tree. A lovely, purple little tree.
Now, Sepha stood closer, with only a few fallen trunks separating her from the purple tree. Its writhing, pulsing mass of roots surged above the ground and below it again, determinedly alive in the midst of all this destruction. Inside the purple canopy was a luscious crimson moss, deep and inviting and perfect. A lovely amber liquid seeped from the tree’s branches and splashed onto the ground, where it sizzled against the rain-soaked earth.
The tree was weeping.
“Oh,” Sepha murmured as pity surged inside her. She knew how it felt to be left so abruptly alone.
Sepha climbed onto another trunk and was about to leap down when a hand closed around her arm.
With one strong yank, the hand pulled Sepha backward off the trunk and onto the ground.
“Let me go!” Sepha shouted at the same time that the man bellowed, “Don’t get closer to it!”
From where she was on the ground on the wrong side of the fallen trunk, the lovely purple tree was out of sight. Sepha could only see a pair of frantic eyes beneath a frown, could only feel that hand tight around her arm.
There was a crashing sense of returning.
The world exploded into wind and rain and thunder and chaos, and Sepha looked wildly around, pushing strands of wet hair from her eyes. She was forgetting—she had forgotten—
“What were you thinking?” the man shouted over the storm. “Are you insane?”
Sepha tore her arm from the man’s grip. “No, I’m not insane! I just wanted to see that tree!” She stretched up, trying to peer at it over the trunk, but the man yanked her back down.
“Don’t look at it!” he shouted, looking panicky.
“Why not?” Sepha shouted back.
“Because that’s a Wicking Willow!”
Sepha’s eyes widened.
A Wicking … Willow.
Sepha’s mouth went dry as she remembered everything Teacher had said about Wicking Willows. The dead trees. The purple leaves, the crimson moss. The way she’d walked toward it in a daze as soon as she’d laid eyes on it. That sizzling liquid.
The purple leaves were a lure, and the tree was a trap. That liquid seeping from the branches wasn’t tears; it was acid. The acid would have burned through Sepha’s flesh and sent her into a trance, so that she would fall willingly into the crimson moss. And die there.
And the Willow was so very close.
Teacher’s instructions regarding the Wicking Willow were simple.
Run.
Sepha scrambled to her feet and ran. She only made it half a step before something cinched tight around her ankle and she crashed to the ground.
A pulsing gray root had wrapped around her boot. Sepha yanked her foot back as hard as she could, but the root cinched even tighter. She scrabbled against the mud, fighting without effect as the root pulled her closer to the Wicking Willow. Within seconds, she was pressed tight against the trunk of the nearest fallen tree.
The man fumbled with the root, but it was cinched too tight.
The root gave a great wrench, and the fallen tree groaned. Sepha bit back a shriek as the pain in her ankle went sharp.
Get away—she had to get away.
“We need something to cut it with!” the man shouted.
Something to cut it with? bleated a panicky voice inside Sepha’s mind. She didn’t have anything sharp! All she had was her ingot and her alchem—
Oh.
Oh!
She knew what to do. Her mind cleared.
“Grab the root!” she shouted. “Don’t let it pull me anywhere!”
The man obeyed, grabbing the root just beyond her foot and straining against it. Sepha plunged her hand into her pocket and retrieved a scrap of paper and a small, rectangular ingot. She carried the paper with her everywhere. She’d traced an alchem, a complex design of concentric circles overlaid with harsh lines and geometric shapes, onto it months ago. It had been a precaution for a circumstance exactly like this, when she would have a desperate need to perform alchemy, but none of the preparation time it required.
Fumbling a little, she flattened the paper onto the ground. Raindrops splattered against the paper, and Sepha forced herself to move faster. She had to use the alchem before the rain smudged the ink away.
Sepha placed the ingot inside the alchem. Then, settling her fingers just so along the alchem’s outermost edge, she closed her eyes and focused.
It was silent. It was dark.
The alchem pulsed, sending a jarring vibration through her body—the signal that her alchemy had worked. Sepha opened her eyes and allowed herself a grim smile. The metal was transformed, of course, just as she’d intended. She’d exchanged the ingot for a small, sharp axe. There hadn’t been enough metal for a handle.
Sepha grabbed the axe by the head and thrust it at the man. He understood at once and hacked through the root in one smooth swing. Water spurted out of the root like blood. The man hauled her to her feet and said, unnecessarily, “Run!”
Without stopping to thank him or looking back, Sepha ran. The man, despite his enormous size, kept pace as they scrambled across the fallen trees toward the line of living wood, away from the Willow’s reach.
Behind Sepha, there was a seething hiss, then a pause.
A regrouping moment.
Then the earth groaned.
There was the punctuated sound of taut strings snapping, and the clearing exploded into chaos. Long, shallow roots ripped up from the ground with such force that they flung dirt and stones and trunks into the air.
The Willow was ripping up its own roots to stop them from escaping.
The world shrank to just this breath, this step, this dodge. Sepha shouted, “Behind you!” and heard him bellow, “To your left!” A stone glanced off Sepha’s temple, and the man narrowly avoided being crushed beneath a trunk that spun through the air.
They reached the edge of the ring of dead trees and skidded to a stop. There, between them and the living forest, was a writhing wall of thin roots woven closely together. The wall grew higher and higher, then crashed over them, forming a net the Willow could use to drag them to their deaths.
The net tightened around them. Grasping roots looped around Sepha’s arms and legs and cinched tight. There was a ringing sound in her ears and she slowed, held in place by the ropelike roots.
“Keep fighting!” the man shouted. His voice shook her from her panicked stupor. Sepha clawed at the roots, grabbing them and tearing them away from her as she pushed through the tightening wall. From the sounds of it, the man was fighting just as hard.
The roots became thinner, weaker, as the Wicking Willow’s terrible magic ran out. With one final push, Sepha and the man tumbled into the mud on the other side.