The sap-bath had set.

  It clung to her skin in a thin glaze, tacky in places where the air had reached it first, slick in the hollows of her throat and behind her knees. It smelled green and sharp, like crushed leaves and iron in the rain. The root-menders had stripped her armor off hours ago. They’d stripped her pride with it. They’d laid her in the cradle-woven bed and packed her in warmth until the torn parts stopped trying to spill apart.

  Now they stood back.

  Imrahil sat on the edge of the cradle with her hands on her thighs and her bare feet on living wood. The bough under her toes flexed with her weight, the grain pulsing faintly with the Grove’s slow light. She lifted her right hand and touched her forehead.

  There was a seam there.

  A fine line, pale against her skin, like a hair laid under glass. Her fingers found it and followed it and stopped where the bone underneath felt wrong—too smooth, too new. Her palm came away damp with sap.

  She swallowed once and tasted it anyway, sharp on the back of her tongue, as if her own body had turned into a wound that refused to be fully clean.

  A root-mender in vine-stitched robes watched her from the doorway. He kept his eyes down.

  Imrahil lowered her hand and stared at the floor.

  The floor was grown in concentric rings. Dark wood, pale wood, dark wood again. The pattern made her think of ripples spreading from a stone drop.

  A boom. A grown platform breaking under a metal thing. Gold spraying across a railing. Her own scream choking off when the world hit her like a falling tree. Her fingers twitched once on her knee.

  The root-mender cleared his throat. It sounded small in the chamber.

  “They are assembled, your highness.” he said.

  Imrahil did not look up. “Who.”

  “All,” he said. He hesitated on the word as if it weighed more than it should. “The Council Bough. Your siblings. The Grand Prince.”

  The Grand Prince.

  Leorec’s title filled the room before his voice ever could.

  Imrahil slid off the cradle and stood. Her left leg took the weight and held. Her right leg followed a fraction late, stiff through the hip, still not fully healed. She rolled her ankle and forced the joint to obey. The skin there was perfect. The movement wasn’t.

  She reached for the robe folded on the low branch-table and shrugged into it. The cloth was soft, spun from bark-silk, the kind she used to wear when she wanted to feel delicate. It did not sit right on her shoulders now. It hung like it belonged to someone else.

  The root-mender lifted a hand as if to help with the tie at her throat. Imrahil tied it herself, hard enough that the knot bit.

  “You may go,” she said.

  He bowed and stepped away, faster than courtesy required.

  Imrahil walked out into the corridor.

  Thornlight’s inner halls breathed.

  The walls were living wood shaped into arches, the ceiling a vault of braided branches that carried pale light along vein-lines. Lanterns of hardened leaf-glass hung like fruit and glowed without flame. Somewhere deep in the roots, water ran, and its sound crept along the floorboards like whispering.

  There were guards.

  Not her guard. Not the ones she’d chosen for her first crossing. These wore ridge-plate that had seen real war—dark bark armor layered with metal, helms edged with thorn-ridges, spears tipped with black leafsteel. They stood on either side of the corridor and watched her without moving.

  Imrahil kept her chin up and walked through them.

  She had taken three steps before she noticed the smell.

  Smoke.

  Not hearth-smoke. Not cook fires. It carried a bite of scorched sap and melted resin, and under it, another stink that made her jaw tighten.

  Burnt meat.

  It had seeped into the halls like a stain.

  Someone had come back through the Crossing with fire on them.

  Someone had come back through the Crossing missing pieces.

  She passed a side archway and caught sight of a stretcher-bed inside a smaller chamber. A warrior lay on it with his chest wrapped tight in bark-cloth. His hands were blackened to the knuckles. A root-mender leaned over him with a bowl of sap and a knife to cut away dead flesh.

  The warrior’s eyes were open. They did not blink.

  Imrahil walked faster.

  The corridor widened into a long gallery where the walls opened into tall slats that looked out into the Grove. It was night beyond the wood, but Thornlight’s night never went fully dark. The canopy glowed with insect-light and the slow pulse of fungus-lanterns. Leaves shifted. Somewhere far off, a horn sounded once—low and controlled.

  She almost stopped at the sound.

  Her body remembered a different horn.

  On a riverbank.

  A lane opening through spearpoints.

  A face she’d watched split like fruit.

  She did not stop.

  At the far end of the gallery, the guards parted around a set of double doors grown from a single trunk. Vines ran up the surface like veins. Thornlight’s crest was pressed into the wood, grown into it: a crown of thorns over a leaf.

  The doors were open.

  The sound inside hit her first.

  Voices.

  Many.

  Not the soft talk of courtiers. This was a hard storm of words, sharp enough that the wood itself seemed to listen.

  Imrahil stepped through.

  The Council Bough was a living dome, larger than the prison-dome she’d used in the new world, but shaped for rule instead of cattle. Pillars rose like trees with their trunks smoothed and their tops braided into the ceiling. Platforms grew in tiers around the center, each one a seat carved from living bough. A long table of polished rootwood ran down the middle.

  Twenty seats.

  Not all filled.

  Enough of them were.

  Imrahil saw them as a line of faces she’d known her whole life, and in the space of a heartbeat she understood how small she was among them.

  Leorec sat at the far end of the table where the wood rose into a high-backed chair grown with thorn ridges that framed his shoulders like wings. His hair was bound back in a war-knot, silver shot through the black. The scar on his jaw cut down through the corner of his mouth and pulled the skin tight when he spoke. He wore a breastplate of layered leafsteel and bark, polished to a dull sheen. His hands rested on the table, knuckles pale, fingers still.

  Calrathil stood to his right.

  Second eldest. Taller than Leorec by a hair. Leaner. Her armor fit her like it had grown around her ribs. A pale cloak lay across her shoulders, pinned with a thorn-brooch. Her hair was braided close, no loose strands. She watched the room without moving her head much, eyes doing the work.

  Other siblings clustered along the tiers.

  Vaelor—third—leaned with one boot on a lower root step and his hands crossed over the head of his spear. His left ear was gone. The edge of it had been taken clean. He stared at Imrahil like she was a stray dog that had tracked mud in.

  Seryn—one of the older sisters—sat with her forearms on her knees, fingers flexing and unflexing as if she couldn’t decide whether to hold herself together. Her eyes flicked to Imrahil’s forehead and then away.

  Two princes in the back wore the gray of the Wardens. One had a bandage across his throat that was soaked through in places. The other held his helm under his arm, and his hair near the scalp was singed short.

  At the center of the table, a map had been grown directly into the wood. Lines of root had been coaxed into the shape of coast and forest and plain. A small section was blackened, the grain fused into a glossy patch as if someone had pressed heat into it.

  The new world.

  A runner stepped away from the table as Imrahil entered. His hands were stained with soot. He looked down and moved fast. No one announced her. No one needed to.

  Every head turned anyway.

  Imrahil walked to the empty seat near the bottom tier.

  It was her seat.

  Closest to the door.

  Closest to the floor.

  She did not sit.

  Leorec’s gaze stayed on her as if she were an object being measured.

  “You will stand,” he said.

  Imrahil held his eyes. Her throat worked once.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Leorec shifted his hand on the table. The wood creaked under his palm.

  “Report,” he said, and he did not look away from Imrahil when he said it.

  A burned Warden stepped forward from the left tier. He planted his spear butt on the wood and bowed to Leorec and Calrathil both. When he straightened, his jaw moved as if it pained him to speak.

  “The Crossing is stable,” he said. “More of our people move through each hour. The rootpath holds. The Grove’s song holds.”

  “And the others,” Vaelor said from his lean, voice rough.

  The Warden’s mouth tightened. “The first wave is broken.”

  A low noise moved through the room. It wasn’t a gasp. It wasn’t a groan. It was the sound of bodies shifting under anger.

  The Warden kept his eyes on the map. He spoke like he had rehearsed the words to keep them from turning into something else.

  “The human captives are gone,” he said. “The armory was emptied. Our spear-racks were stripped. Our leafsmiths were killed at their tables. The root-dome was cut open.”

  Imrahil’s fingers curled in the robe’s fabric.

  Leorec’s eyes did not move.

  “The Hollow escaped,” the Warden said.

  Silence dropped hard enough that the room seemed to shrink around it.

  Imrahil heard her own breath. She heard the faint tap of sap dripping somewhere in the dome.

  The Warden swallowed.

  “It fed,” he said. “Repeatedly. It killed our warriors with its bare hands. It grew stronger as it did. It summoned beasts—bound creatures—spider and toad and worse. We realized too late that it was a Beastmaster.”

  Someone on the back tier spat a word in Thornspeech that sounded like a curse chewed through teeth.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  The Warden’s gaze flicked up for half a heartbeat and then down again.

  “An Executioner was deployed,” he said.

  A few heads turned toward Imrahil then. Not all. Enough.

  Imrahil kept her face still. She kept her shoulders square.

  The Warden continued, his voice flattening as if that was the only way to get the next part out.

  “The Executioner followed its command, but the Hollow tricked it. It broke through the barrier. It destroyed the front tier. It killed—”

  He hesitated. He did not say her name.

  Leorec said it for him.

  “It killed the princess,” Leorec said.

  The words hit like a slap. Imrahil’s jaw tightened. Her tongue pressed against her teeth. She did die from that affair. But regrowing an entirely new body had been simple enough with all the resources they had, though it remained costly.

  The Warden bowed his head once. “Yes.”

  “And the staff-singer,” Calrathil said. Her voice did not rise. It cut through the room anyway.

  The Warden nodded. “Thalanor is dead, but his soul has been preserved. As soon as a new body is made available, we can resurrect him.”

  A chair scraped on wood. Someone’s fingers dug into a knee hard enough to whiten.

  Thalanor.

  Imrahil saw his face again—smooth, contemptuous. His body crushed into a platform by the thing she’d summoned.

  Leorec’s hand closed on the table edge. The thorn ridges along his chair’s back trembled slightly with the pressure.

  “Continue,” Leorec said.

  The Warden then recounted… everything that happened–the escape of the captives, the ensuing battle that ended in disaster, the chase through that dry scrubland, and then… apparently another disaster that, this time, was not through Imrahil’s own failure, but by another variable they hadn’t expected.

  “Speak plain,” Vaelor said.

  “Orks,” the Warden said. “Warbands on boars. A green dragon.”

  A hush again, different this time.

  Calrathil’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “The Hollow remained the priority?”

  “Yes,” the Warden said. “A Silver Warden led the pursuit.”

  Imrahil’s gaze snapped to the gray-cloaked men on the back tier.

  One of them did not look away. He looked at her as if he could see the outline of every mistake she’d made.

  “The pursuit failed, entirely once the Hollow Beastmaster killed the Blue Dragon and used it for himself,” the Warden said. “Then the Hollow slipped into human territory. It has not been recovered.”

  Leorec leaned forward, and the room leaned with him without meaning to.

  “How many dead,” Leorec said.

  The Warden’s mouth worked. “We do not have a full count, my lord. Hundreds.”

  Leorec’s eyes stayed on Imrahil.

  “Hundreds,” he repeated, softly.

  Imrahil’s mouth went dry. She swallowed once. Her throat scraped.

  Leorec stood.

  The chair behind him grew back an inch as he rose, the living wood making room.

  He walked down the length of the table without hurry. The sound of his boots on polished rootwood was steady. When he passed the blackened patch on the map, his shadow cut over it and made it look darker.

  Imrahil did not back up. She had nowhere to back up to. The door was behind her. Twenty seats and twenty lives were around her like a cage.

  Leorec stopped three paces from her.

  He looked at her forehead.

  He looked at her right leg.

  He looked at her hands.

  “They rebuilt you,” he said.

  Imrahil’s lips parted. No words came out.

  Leorec’s gaze lifted back to her eyes.

  “They rebuilt you,” he said again, and his voice gained weight. “Do you know how many could not be rebuilt?”

  Imrahil’s fingers clenched in her robe. She forced her jaw to move.

  “The Hollow—” she began.

  Leorec’s hand lifted.

  Imrahil stopped mid-word.

  Leorec’s palm hovered between them, open, not yet a strike. The threat sat in it anyway.

  “You opened the Crossing,” he said. “You took the first wave. You took the best leaf-guard we could spare without emptying Thornlight’s walls. You took a staff-singer who had bound more roots than you have lived years.”

  Imrahil’s nostrils flared. She kept her chin high.

  Leorec’s voice stayed even. That made it worse.

  “You were sent to build,” he said. “To root in. To take cattle. To learn the lay of the land. To return with a map and a mouthful of names.”

  He stepped closer.

  Imrahil did not move. Her spine held. Her stomach did not.

  “You returned with a Hollow loose in a new world,” Leorec said. “And a graveyard behind you.”

  Imrahil’s teeth pressed together. The words wanted out anyway.

  “It was a Hollow,” she said. “You speak as if I let a drunk human slip past a gate.”

  Leorec’s eyes narrowed slightly.

  “You summoned an Executioner,” Vaelor said. His voice came from the side, and it was not calm. “An Executioner. For a child.”

  Imrahil turned her head toward Vaelor. “He was killing them.”

  Vaelor pushed off his lean and took two steps down from his tier. “He was feeding on them.”

  Imrahil’s jaw worked. “Yes.”

  “And you watched,” Vaelor said.

  Imrahil’s hands tightened harder. “I was in the stands.”

  “And you screamed for spectacle,” Seryn said. She rose from her seat and came down one step. Her eyes were fixed on Imrahil’s throat now, where faint lines sat like healed cuts. “You screamed for an Executioner because you wanted him to break.”

  Imrahil’s face warmed. “I wanted him dead.”

  Seryn’s mouth pulled tight. She lifted her hand and made a small gesture, two fingers pressed to her own chest.

  “The Hollow reached for you,” she said.

  Imrahil froze.

  She remembered it then.

  Not a hand.

  A pull.

  A cold hunger that had opened somewhere near the boy, and the air itself had leaned toward him. The mist had snapped. She’d seen it—thin ribbons of pale light tearing out of bodies. She’d watched it disappear into him.

  She’d stood above it and felt, for one small beat, that if she fell into that pit, something inside her would be peeled away.

  Imrahil’s mouth went dry again.

  Imrahil’s fingers twitched. She held herself still.

  Leorec turned his head slightly, as if giving Calrathil space to speak. Calrathil did not take it. She stayed quiet.

  Leorec returned his attention to Imrahil.

  “You have read the stories,” he said.

  Imrahil’s throat tightened. “Yes.”

  “You have memorized the names,” Leorec said. “The Hollow Wars. The Black Crusades. Dates. Banners. Counts.”

  Imrahil’s shoulders squared. “Yes.”

  Leorec’s voice dropped lower.

  “I have smelled them,” he said. “I have heard a Devourer eat a grove’s song and leave the trees standing like bones. I have watched comrades die and stand back up empty, walking toward us with our friend’s face and nothing behind their eyes.”

  Imrahil’s fingers went numb where they gripped cloth.

  Leorec’s scar pulled when he spoke the next words. His mouth tightened at the corner.

  “I have fought beside our Father,” he said. “On ground so soaked the roots refused to drink. I have watched him burn Hollows until the sky turned black with ash and still they kept coming.”

  Imrahil’s breath hitched once. She swallowed it down.

  Leorec stepped in close enough that his armor almost touched her robe.

  “You stood over the first Hollow we have seen in centuries,” he said, “and you treated it like a beast to be shamed.”

  Imrahil’s teeth showed. “He is a beast.”

  Leorec’s hand moved.

  It was fast.

  The slap hit the side of Imrahil’s face and turned her head. Her hair snapped across her cheek. The sound cracked through the dome and died against living wood. Imrahil’s ears rang. She tasted her own blood. Her hand rose halfway as if to touch her cheek and stopped in midair when she saw Leorec’s eyes. He stood with his arm lowered again, palm open, as if he had struck a thing that needed correction, not a sister.

  Imrahil forced her head back to center. Her jaw trembled once. She locked it.

  Leorec’s voice did not rise.

  “You do not understand the gravity of this situation, you foolish girl.” he said. “You have lived under Thornlight’s canopy with guards and lessons and songs. You were never there when the Hollows threatened us with extinction.”

  Imrahil’s nostrils flared.

  She took one step forward before she remembered who he was. “And you think I don’t know that now.”

  Leorec’s eyes held hers. “In your impotence, all you’ve done was scream at it like a petulant child.”

  “And what should I have done?!” Imrahil said. Her voice came out too loud. She heard it echo. She did not pull it back. “Your soldiers—your trained and noble soldiers, supposed to be the cream of the crop—fell like grass and it kept moving. This failure is on their strength of arms, not mine!”

  Vaelor’s hand tightened on his spear.

  Seryn’s fingers flexed.

  Imrahil kept going. The words had teeth now and she wanted to bite with them.

  “You sent me with a staff-singer and leaf-guard and told me the humans were cattle,” she said. “You told me their thunder weapons were toys. You told me it would be easy to deal with primitives.”

  Leorec’s gaze did not flicker.

  Imrahil’s voice sharpened. “You were wrong.”

  The room moved in small ways. A chair creaked. Someone’s breath hissed through teeth.

  Leorec watched her for a long beat.

  Then he stepped closer again.

  Imrahil held her ground.

  Leorec’s hand lifted.

  Imrahil’s mouth opened.

  He hit her again.

  This slap landed across her mouth. Her teeth cut the inside of her cheek. She tasted blood and sap together, metallic and green.

  Imrahil’s eyes watered. She blinked once, hard, and kept them open.

  Leorec leaned in so the words did not have to travel.

  “I was there,” he said. “When the first Devourer came through the Grove’s wall and the trees screamed like animals. I was there when Father carried your brother’s body out of the ash and told us we would end it, or it would end us.”

  Imrahil’s breath came shallow. She held it anyway.

  Leorec’s voice stayed low. “You do not get to call me wrong while you stand rebuilt and whole.”

  Imrahil’s hands shook once. She forced them still by folding them into fists.

  Leorec straightened and stepped back. He turned away from her and walked to the head of the table again. Calrathil moved with him, one pace behind and to the right.

  Leorec faced the room.

  “The Crossing remains,” he said. “The new world remains. The Hollow remains.”

  He let the last word hang.

  “You will not lead again,” he said, and his gaze cut back to Imrahil. “Not now.”

  Imrahil’s throat tightened. She forced words out around it.

  “You can’t—”

  Leorec raised a hand without looking at her. Imrahil stopped. The hand did it.

  Leorec pointed to Calrathil.

  “Calrathil will command the Expedition,” he said. “Second eldest. Battle-tested. She has lived through the Age you read about in safety.”

  Calrathil placed her hand on the table edge, fingers spread, and nodded once.

  Leorec’s eyes shifted back to Imrahil.

  “You will go with her,” he said. “You will speak when she asks. You will carry messages. You will watch. You will learn what a Hollow is when it is not on a page.”

  Imrahil’s jaw tightened so hard her teeth ached.

  “I am a princess,” she said. “I am royalty!”

  Leorec’s gaze stayed flat. “So am I.”

  Imrahil’s voice rose. She heard it climb and could not pull it down fast enough.

  “You are punishing me to cover your own failure,” she snapped. “You want me small so you can pretend you didn’t send children to build a kingdom in a world you didn’t understand.”

  Vaelor shifted like he meant to step in.

  Seryn’s hand lifted slightly.

  Calrathil’s eyes narrowed a fraction.

  Leorec moved.

  He crossed the space in three strides and grabbed Imrahil’s robe at the collar. The cloth tightened under her throat. Her back hit the wood pillar behind her with a dull thud that jarred her teeth.

  Leorec’s forearm pressed across her chest like a bar.

  Imrahil’s hands came up and pushed at his wrist. The muscle under his skin did not move.

  “You nearly had your soul eaten,” he said. “Do you know what would have happened to it?”

  Imrahil’s mouth opened. No words came.

  Leorec’s hand tightened on her collar.

  “If the Hollow had taken you,” he said, “it would have taken Thornlight with you. It would have taken the Grove’s blood. It would have grown fat on a princess’ soul and turned its eyes on your sister next.”

  Imrahil’s throat worked around cloth.

  Leorec’s gaze stayed locked on her. His breath did not quicken. His hand did not shake.

  “You do not know the gravity of your failure, whelp,” he said again. “You know pride.”

  Imrahil’s lips pulled back. Her voice came out hoarse. “And you know only fear.”

  Leorec’s eyes narrowed.

  He released her collar and slapped her one more time, backhanded, hard enough that her head snapped sideways and her braid struck the pillar with a soft crack.

  Imrahil’s knees dipped. She caught herself on the pillar with one hand. Her palm slid on smooth wood. Her breath came in ragged pulls.

  Leorec turned away as if she had ceased to be an opponent worth facing.

  He went back to the table.

  Calrathil remained where she was, watching Imrahil with that quiet, measured stillness.

  Leorec faced the room again.

  “More of our people cross,” he said. “Each hour. Each day. We will not stop now because a Hollow slipped its leash.”

  He planted both hands on the table and leaned forward.

  “And we will not be alone,” he said. “The Crossing draws eyes. It draws hunger.”

  Vaelor’s jaw set.

  Seryn’s fingers curled.

  Leorec’s gaze swept the tiers.

  “Other kingdoms will come,” he said. “They will smell the land without roots. They will smell cattle without fences. They will smell a world that has not learned our laws.”

  Imrahil pushed off the pillar slowly. The room swayed once. She steadied herself by locking her knees.

  Leorec’s voice stayed even, and it carried to every leaf-glass lantern and every listening root.

  “We must be ready before they arrive,” he said. “We must take the Crossing’s throat in our hands and hold it.”

  His eyes found Imrahil again.

  “And we must kill the Hollow,” Leorec said. “Before it feeds on more souls. Before it becomes a Scourge.”

  Leorec turned to Imrahil and his eyes were nothing but contempt and disgust.

  “I ended Hollows so the threat would never shake our world again,” he said. “I did it beside Father. I will not watch you bring that age back through a door you could not guard.”

  Silence sat heavy in the dome.

  Imrahil stood with her cheek burning and her mouth bleeding and her hands clenched hard enough that her nails bit skin.

  Calrathil turned her head slightly toward Imrahil.

  Her voice was quiet. It still reached.

  “You will come with me, failure.” Calrathil said.

  Imrahil’s jaw worked. She tasted blood again. She nodded once, small and sharp.

  Leorec straightened. He looked past her, past the doors, as if he could already see lines of warriors crossing and more banners behind them.

  “Make ready,” he said. “We move with the dawnsong.”

  Imrahil stood in the Council Bough with sap still drying on her skin and the taste of her own blood in her mouth, and she watched her siblings turn away from her like a tide turning from a rock.

  The doors behind her stayed open.

  The corridor outside waited.

  So did the Crossing.

  So did the Hollow.

  END OF BOOK 2