Voices swirled around Issina as she stepped onto the ladder and worked her way up to the lowest limb.
It will be a miracle if she reaches those branches.
Filthy dress... gone all night... does she truly belong to Odele?
She’s so plain... and only two eyes in such a family. How odd.
She ignored them as she wrapped her legs around the lower limb. Odele was yelling something at her, but she ignored that too. She would reach the branches and end this.
Carefully, she stood and began to climb. There were footholds carved into the upper trunk from previous climbers’ attempts. She used them, reached another limb, and stretched her arm toward a golden apple directly above her head. Closer. She saw the scars on her hands and remembered Odele’s switch, Edryn swinging a string in front of her face as a wooden duck burned in the fire, Sybil brushing through her hair in a meadow, and to top it all off, two geese roasting over a fire. She gritted her teeth.
She slipped.
A gust-like force swept her into the air and she fell down, down, down to the ground.
The tree stood over her, mocking, and beyond it stood Braeden. He bent down to smooth a hand over her brow, concern filling his face. “I was here to catch you, but it was like a wind knocked you out of my reach.”
She blinked, shocked that he was touching her, but even more shocked that she hadn’t reached the fruit. Oken had said the tree was hers. If she couldn’t reach the fruit, she couldn’t become a healer. If she couldn’t become a healer, she couldn’t create a complex bond with Oken. It would remain simple and she would not see him often. At least this was how she understood it. Odele would tighten her grasp on her two-eyed daughter. She felt that grasp already as Odele reached down and yanked her to her feet.
“I knew you couldn’t do it,” she hissed, and shoved her toward the crowd. “She’s the cause for this curse!” she screamed. “My two-eyed daughter, who has never done anything good her entire life. I used to think she didn’t have magic, but I was wrong. She has used sorcery to conjure this evil tree that taunts us! Not even the sorceress can trump her own evil.”
“Mother, please stop. None of this is true.” She kept her eyes on the ground. Where was Oken now? Genevieve? She imagined them in the forest, disappointed that she had run away. She didn’t belong anywhere. Perhaps Odele was right—she could not trump her own powers.
“Madame, stop.” Braeden stepped forward and whisked Issina away from her grasp. “The tree doesn’t strike me as necessarily evil. Let me try to reach the branches. I’m on the High Council and understand these matters more than most.”
Issina twisted in his arms. “No, you mustn’t! Please, I beg you, don’t.”
He laughed and gently led her to Sybil, who took her arm and pulled her away from him. “Don’t worry, Issina. I’ll use the ladder my men have gone to fetch. I see them coming up the road now. You see? It’s taller. I’ll reach the higher branches with ease!”
He untied his cloak and tossed his hat to the ground. Issina’s heart plummeted. She watched helplessly as his men set up the ladder and he began to climb.
Edryn moved closer to Sybil and turned to look at Issina. Her eye was wet and filled with anger. It seemed to say, he’s mine, he’s mine, he’s mine. “Braeden is drawn to magic,” she said in a controlled voice. “He senses something very strong in you—magic, or something stronger— and he wishes to belong to it.” Her fingers curled around Issina’s arm, the same arm Sybil was grasping. They both squeezed so tightly Issina’s fingers went numb. She held her breath.
“But he will marry me,” Edryn hissed.
“Yes, Edryn, I know.” She tried to keep her eyes on her sister, but she couldn’t. They darted back to Braeden. She was not in love with him. She knew that now, but panic shot through her chest all the same. She didn’t want him hurt. She didn’t want Edryn hurt. As he reached the top of the ridiculously tall ladder, it seemed to sway in the breeze. The crowd held its breath.
“Edryn, this is for you,” he called down to her, smiling.
Edryn screamed as he fell to the ground. She dropped Issina’s arm and ran to her fiancé, weeping. Sybil let go of Issina and ran to him next. Odele followed. The crowd pressed in, murmuring as a physician rushed forward.
Evil tree... sorceress... he’s dead.
Hands grasped her. One man took her by the waist and began to drag her down the road, yelling that the council would have her head.
“Stop!”
Odele ran toward him, frantic, and ordered him to let her go. He complied, and Odele grabbed Issina’s shoulders, peering into her eyes as she had done a thousand times before. Only this time she stopped. Her eye squinted.
“I thought so,” she whispered, her face a contortion of anger and disbelief. “The moment you arrived this morning—something was different. Your eyes are filled with that same light, his light, so beautiful, but not a tiger’s. Your eyes are vibrant and alive, like a plant. You’re—”
“A healer,” Issina finished for her and gasped as Odele’s fingernails dug into her shoulders. “Like him, and I only want to help.” She looked down and tried to swallow her tears, but they came anyway. “I killed him, my own father, but it’s not what you think. I’m sorry your magic disappeared because of me. I’m sorry I took away everything you love. I’m sorry.”
Odele’s grip relaxed. Slowly, she released her and stepped back. “A... healer? How is it possible?” Her hands formed fists. “It can’t be.”
“I don’t know, but it’s true. All I have to do is reach the golden fruit and I will be complete. Father had to kill a tiger, and I must reach the fruit. Every healer must pass a test. Mother, you must believe me.”
Odele took another step back. “He told me about the tiger.”
“Then reach the fruit!” Edryn wailed. “If any of this is true, Issina, you must save him.”
The physician looked up from Braeden, his forehead wrinkled. “He isn’t dead yet,” he said, “but he’s fading quickly. If I move him, he’ll die.”
Issina shook her head and walked to Braeden. She knelt down. “I don’t know how to reach the fruit.” She touched him and thought of her father lying next to a man with an arrow in his chest. She knew she couldn’t heal him yet. Her emotions gathered inside her like a tiny seed, formed with Oken’s bond to her, focused, but unable to push through the ground. She had to reach the fruit.
She looked up at the tree. The sun glittered through the branches. It was brilliant and awful at the same time. The tree cast a dark shadow across Braeden’s body. Edryn turned away from Issina and wrapped her arms around him as her tears wet his face.
“Your corra is different,” Sybil said as she rose to her feet. “It’s golden. It’s beautiful.” Her expression, hostile since last night, melted into confusion. “It must be true. Your corra is the same color as Father’s.”
Issina stumbled backward. She remembered the serene landscape Oken had shown her, neither dark nor light. No anger. No pain. She saw Edryn’s hair as deep as shadow, and Sybil’s as bright as fire.
She looked to the forest where elves had begun to gather, blending with the trees so well that nobody noticed them except Issina. She imagined they had always been close to her as she grew up, waiting. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Part of her knew it was fate, but another part knew she must choose for herself. That choice was now. She backed away and looked at her sisters and Odele.
“As a healer,” she said slowly, “I must control my emotions. You three have tormented me my entire life, but I can’t be angry with you for that. You’ve seen the damage caused from my anger—the dead flowers in your garden. You’ve caused your own damage and killed my only friends, but I forgive you. It’s the only way.”
The three of them looked at her with widened eyes, and the beast inside her finally began to weaken. She meant every word.
“I’m sorry for Father’s death,” she said, turning to Odele. “I know I’ve hurt you, but....”
Odele raised a hand. “I’ve heard enough. This trickery of yours won’t work. Your sister’s fiancé lies dying because of you, and I won’t listen to another word out of your mouth.”
Issina marched forward before Odele had a chance to move a muscle. “You must listen to me,” she commanded, moving close enough to Odele to see the sweat covering her brow. “You can’t control me anymore, Mother. You tried to control Father, and look where it landed him. You told him to destroy me, and he tried. You turned him against me, and it destroyed him instead. I was a baby. I knew nothing but instinct, and I fought for my own survival. You can’t blame me for that.”
Odele’s mouth opened and closed. She looked at Sybil and Edryn, at the physician, who watched all of them with confusion on his face. The crowd hummed with whispers.
Odele finally found her words. “How do you know what I told your father?”
“I’m a healer—or will be very soon. I have the power to see the past and the future, if need be.”
Odele turned her back. Her shoulders rose and fell with angry breaths. “It’s true,” she whimpered. “When you took my magic, I was left with nothing. I didn’t understand how much more I could lose.”
“I’m sorry.” Issina couldn’t think of anything else to say. She ached for Odele at that moment. She saw the swan struggling to rise, unable to open her wings, broken forever.
“We must hurry,” the physician urged. “I can’t save him.”
Straightening her shoulders, Issina turned to her sisters. Sybil had sat down next to Edryn, and both of them looked up at her. Their beautiful gowns from the festival were rumpled.
Rushing forward, she knelt in front of them. She was connected to them by something her heart didn’t understand. It wasn’t their beauty or their magic. She was incomplete without them, but she finally understood they were also incomplete without her. Her heart filled with love for them, so different from the envy she had harbored for so long.
A solution formed itself in her mind, tightening, growing brighter. If nobody could reach the fruit by ladder, perhaps a rope would work.
“Does anyone have a rope?” she asked loudly, and looked around.
“We tried that already,” a young farmer said, approaching her. He extended his arms to show her two pieces of thick, coiled rope. “It broke, so we tried another one, and it broke too. It doesn’t seem like that tree wants us to pick any of the fruit.”
“The tree is wicked,” Odele said, almost whimpering as she looked at Braeden.
Issina looked at the rope in the farmer’s hands. Her mind was spinning so fast she couldn’t keep up. “Maybe the rope will work for me,” she said. She tried to keep her breaths calm. “Can you secure it to a limb, at least?”
“That part worked fine,” the farmer said, nodding. “It was when we tried to climb it that it broke. The pieces are too short now to do any good, and nobody else has gone to fetch any more.”
“He’s not going to last long enough for us to get more,” Issina said with a glance at Braeden. “I have a feeling it wouldn’t work for me, anyway. We need something different.”
What else would work for a rope? She was sure she was the only one the tree would allow to retrieve the fruit, but even then it seemed picky as to how she did it. Since a ladder hadn’t worked, perhaps something stronger—something unique—was required. The rope seemed like a good idea, but they had none. Then she remembered the rope of plants she had braided in the meadow, the one she had wrapped around her wrist like a bracelet, and an idea clicked into place.
“This might sound strange,” she said, turning to her sisters, “but I need to cut your hair.”
To her surprise, Sybil and Edryn looked back and forth between Odele and Braeden, and then finally nodded. They seemed to understand that if such a sacrifice was necessary to save Braeden, they would give it. Tears ran down their cheeks as the physician cut through their hair with a pair of scissors.
“I don’t understand,” Edryn whimpered.
Issina smoothed out her skirts and motioned for the physician to set the thick locks on her lap. “Now cut mine,” she said, and winced as the scissors sliced through her braid. The physician coiled it in her lap on top of the red and black locks. Her hair seemed dull compared to the others— dirty brown, the color of dead weeds in the winter. She unthreaded her braid and began plaiting it with Edryn’s slick strands, then Sybil’s. Black, red, brown, black, red, brown, black, red, brown. She looked up at Braeden and saw that all color had drained from his face.
Her fingers flashed back and forth. The crowd behind her grew restless. The physician closed his bag.
“What exactly are you doing?” Sybil asked as she touched the ends of her hair, now significantly shorter than before.
“I’ve been thinking. We’re sisters, and with a part of you, given freely to me, I can reach the fruit and save Braeden. I think the tree wants some sort of sacrifice, a bonding of sorts, so it knows our intentions are good. That’s my best guess.”
The elves watched her from the trees. Her fingers moved faster and faster until they became a blur. The rope grew in her hands, soft and thick, and as it grew, the connection between her and Sybil and Edryn strengthened. The confusion in their faces dissolved into hope. Even Odele watched, tears wet on her face.
Finally, she finished. She stood and coiled the rope around her arm. It seemed longer than it should, as if it had stretched itself as she had braided it. Staring up at the tree, she wondered how she would get the rope tied around a limb. The ladder. If she didn’t reach for the fruit, she was sure the tree wouldn’t push her away. She started to climb the same ladder Braeden had used.
“Issina, that’s not safe,” Odele said as she grabbed hold of a lower rung. “You’ll fall and end up just like him!” She gestured toward Braeden, who was paler than before. His life was almost gone, and even she knew a healer couldn’t restore life if it slipped away completely. She took a deep breath and continued on. This would work. It had to work.
When she reached the top of the ladder, she steadied herself and uncoiled the rope. Now what? The braid felt alive in her hands, as if it wanted to be connected to the tree. Could it be that simple? She was insane for thinking this would work, but when she looked down at her sisters and saw their softened expressions looking up at her, she knew there was a reason she had never truly hated them, no matter what they had done to her.
She tossed the rope to the highest branch above her head. It twisted around the branch, around and around until it seemed to form a knot. She tugged on it, surprised at how secure it felt.
“Issina, don’t!” Sybil yelled out. There was true concern in her voice, and the sound of it warmed Issina’s heart. She gripped the rope with both hands and swung herself off the ladder. The braid stretched. Her hands slipped along the hair, but when she put one hand above the other, over and over, she found more strength inside herself. She rose higher. Her arms burned against the strain of her own weight. She would never reach a fruit in time, and if she did, what then? The ladder seemed far away now. Her fingers ached. Finally, she saw a fruit above her head, perfectly golden. It appeared hard, like metal, but when she let go of the braid to grab it, the skin felt supple. Then she was falling.
In an instant everything inside her changed. Light surrounded her. Her focused emotion, only a tiny seed, began to push upward, ready to bloom. The ground rose up to meet her, but she felt no pain when she landed. The fruit was heavy in her hands.
Scrambling to her feet she rushed to Braeden and took his cold hands into hers. She had to save him for Edryn. She said his name and leaned over him, pressed her forehead to his chest and sang herself into joy.
It was a long time before Braeden woke, but Edryn never left his side. She stroked his brow, her silk dress shiny in the sunlight now filtering through the branches. Issina stood nearby, keenly aware that the elves still watched her from the tree line, yet did nothing. Were they upset with her for leaving? She had acco
mplished her task, but she was worried Braeden would never open his eyes, even though the physician had confirmed he was healed. His heartbeat was strong, his breathing regular. She squeezed the golden apple in her hands. It was squishy, but cold and heavy.
“His thoughts fixated on you so intensely,” Edryn said with a glance at Issina. “He was drawn to your power, and now I know why.” She smiled, but it was shaky. “I am so sorry I’ve treated you badly. You saved him. You are beautiful, just like your thoughts.”
“Why can’t you read them unless you’re singing?” Issina asked, truly curious. She looked up at Sybil standing beneath the tree. “After all, you read Father’s corra, didn’t you?”
Sybil shrugged. “Whenever I read Father’s corra, I was singing. I’d forgotten. Apparently, we can’t read a healer’s corra unless we sing.” She lowered her three eyes. “I won’t read yours unless you wish it, Issina. Thank you for saving Braeden.”
Braeden stirred, and they all turned to watch him. Odele had found a pillow among the rubble that had been her bedroom, and had put it beneath his head. It was purple, and his hair was bright against the tassels.
“Edryn,” he said when he saw her. The joy in his voice made Issina breathe easier. She looked at Odele, who looked back at her and seemed to attempt a smile but failed. Her face looked older now, collapsed like the house behind her, a pile of worn trinkets and frames and dishes that could never be put back together.
Despite the awkwardness, Issina reached out to hold her mother’s hand, squeezing gently before she let go. Then she stepped away and looked to the trees. The elves had disappeared.
Nobody dared cut down the tree, even after its golden fruit and leaves fell to the ground, leaving bare limbs. Issina heard there was a constant crowd around the house, but the king and queen had placed guards at the tree to gather up whatever fell. The riches, the monarchy claimed, belonged to the kingdom as a whole, but there was a rumor the leaves were not truly silver, or the fruit truly gold. Issina doubted they were. She remembered the squishiness of the golden fruit in her hands. It was unlike any gold she knew about. Still, she wished to touch the tree once more. It was what was left of Cassia, and a true reminder of the magic that had happened.
Bonded: Three Fairy Tales, One Bond Page 23