Treacherous Witch

"I saw the goldentree atop the mountain. I spoke with it. And the goldentree revealed the truth of all things. These truths I will now share with you."

Maska's Testimonium, I:VII

She walked.

She sensed that she was in a tunnel, but she couldn't see anything more than a foot ahead. Her breath misted in the cold air.

Presently, a light appeared. Far-off and high up. She turned towards it, quickening her pace, and as if a veil had been lifted the tunnel opened up.

She was approaching the foot of a hill. Thin, straggly grass grew in places, but the way up was covered in boulders and scree. The sky above was pale grey, the world shrouded in mist.

Except for what awaited at the top of the hill.

Bakra had been right.

There was no elixir. No monster. No treasure chamber.

At the top of the hill stood a tree. As tall as a tower with leaves and branches of purest gold, radiating light.

The goldentree.

Tears pricked her eyes. This was it, the royal family's greatest secret. The goldentree had been here all along. They'd built the palace around it, somehow, or found a way to connect them...

She climbed. Shrapnel slid and shifted beneath her feet, but she found a path. It had been walked before.

"Valerie..."

She started, panting, looking around. That voice...

"Valerie."

A cold wind buffeted her. No, she thought. She redoubled her efforts, scrambling up the hill. The goldentree's leaves shimmered. And she sensed a presence, like a rush of air, approaching from the brink of the hill...

She ran the last few feet to the crest as the ghostly figure of Queen Shikra materialised before her. Behind the queen—she gasped—lay the land beyond the goldentree, a ruined forest, all that remained of the silvertrees.

It's the same place. This place... Where I go when I convene with the silvertrees... The goldentree was here all along.

"Wait!" Queen Shikra cried, and as the ghostly figure rushed towards her, Valerie did the only thing she could.

She ran to the goldentree and embraced it, pressing her hands against the bark. A heady, golden light filled her. She drank it in, giddy with its power. The feeling was indescribable. Hot and cold, bitter and sweet, hard and soft, painful and pleasurable, all in a single moment—a fragment—a frozen portrait of eternity. It was euphoric.

The light expanded. And she found herself inside the light, inside the tree...? She looked down at a sea of stars. She looked up at a black cloth, as if the sky had made itself soft and close.

She felt as if she were teetering on the edge of a great truth. The goldentree did not exist by chance. It had an origin, like everything did—

Then Shikra's hand reached into her chest and pulled her out.

Valerie's heart lurched. She cried out—

And then she was floating above the goldentree, the eerie, flat-lit landscape far below her.

What?

She tried to scrabble around, find a purchase, something solid, but there was nothing. She was nothing. She had no anchor, no point of view. She was here and she wasn't.

"Look."

She felt that presence again, Shikra's. Somehow it directed her attention. First to the queen's green eyes, bright, catlike, as that ghostly figure shone with a golden light. Then to the chamber below the temple, where her darkness had dissipated, and Avon and Bakra were locked in battle. But they were hardly moving, as if they were trapped underwater, or in one of those dreams where time slowed down...

What's going on?

She couldn't speak. She had no mouth.

But there was the goldentree below... She focused her perspective, and all at once she saw herself: Valerie, head bowed against the tree in a trance-like state...

Shikra had no body either. But she could speak, move, take a form of some kind... This ethereal magic, this presence without matter... Valerie could do it too. She looked down and saw transparent hands. She imagined the red dress, its shape, lithe limbs, dark hair...

"Well done."

The queen's smile lit up the heavens.

Valerie took in an imaginary breath. "Your Majesty. Is it really you?"

"Yes. You can save me, Valerie. You can bring me back. I'll show you how."

The queen gestured with a glimmering hand, and Valerie descended into the silvertree forest with her. That golden halo... The blessing of the goldentree. She recognised it around Shikra, as she felt the same power within herself.

It is her. The queen.

They were passing through the forest, the ruins of the silvertree stumps still a sad sight around her. One living tree ahead bathed them in its splendour, and Valerie felt a shock of recognition.

"Your tree," said Shikra, turning to face her. "The tree where you received your first blessing."

The silvertree at St. Maia, still standing. So her dream had been true. It occurred to Valerie that the spell was probably intact only because she had survived.

"I—I don't understand," she said.

"I've been waiting for you," said the queen, her voice soft and kind. "Guiding you. And now that you're here, all we have to do is step through..." She gestured at the silvertree. "And everything will be restored."

It was too much. Without the anchor of her body, she felt lost and confused.

"I don't..." Her form flickered; she controlled it. "What do you mean, guiding me? You've been gone for over two years. How are you here? What is this place?"

"Of course." The queen shook her head. "Forgive me. You have no idea how many times I've tried to fix this. You've done incredibly well to get here, and now that you have the blessing of the goldentree too, it's time for you to know what that means. I must warn you: the truth I am about to reveal may be unsettling. It will change everything you have ever known. Do you wish to hear it?"

She trembled. Did she want to finally hear the truth? After chasing the blessings of the silvertrees, grabbing on to any scrap of magical knowledge she could find, there was only one answer to the queen's question.

"Yes!"

Shikra gestured around them. "This place is a kind of limbo. It exists outside the normal boundaries of our world. The trees exist in both planes, but what happens in one affects what happens in the other. Our connection to the goldentree gives us an anchor to this world too, a form of existence in spirit and without body. So when I died, out there in the physical world, the goldentree brought me back here. I've been wandering this place ever since. Look. Take a look at the tree."

Again, Shikra pointed, and again Valerie directed her attention as instructed, to the silvertree of her first blessing.

And she saw through the tree. High Priestess Glynda holding her hand, a younger Valerie with her head bowed and her eyes closed, both of them glowing with the tree's power. Beyond them, dark and barely visible, the square lawn and the crowd around the court, acolytes in their brown robes, priestesses in grey, the villagers...

She recoiled. It was...

It was real.

"Each silvertree," said Queen Shikra, "is a portal. When you connect with the tree, you leave an imprint, a memory. From here you can return through the silvertree to that imprint and start over. That is the gift of the goldentree. The chance to make things right."

For a moment she couldn't speak. The implications were sinking in, profound, world-shaking.

She swallowed. "You can... you can travel into the past?"

"You were blessed before I died. Before the purge. Before the war. We can go back and stop it all."

"I..." Her mind was a whirlwind. "If I step through that tree, you'll be alive again?"

"Yes."

"And I'll be... I'll be eighteen, the day of my blessing? Will I forget all of this? Everything that happened after?"

The queen clasped her hands, expression patient. "You won't forget. No one else will know except the two of us."

"You said you guided me..."

"I saved your tree," said Shikra. "I told Glynda what to do, to give us a way back."

Glynda... How swiftly the High Priestess had acted, how she had known that the silvertree was in danger, that Valerie was the person who needed to protect it...

"And Anwen's book," the queen continued. "I gave him that information for you, Valerie. So that you would come into your power and find me."

His interview with the queen... Then, that meant...

"You knew," she said, dazed. "You knew what would happen. You've been through this before."

Many times, she'd said. Valerie's entire form quivered. If she had bones, they'd be chilled. If Shikra could go back to the past, change the order of events, with no one else the wiser... then who knew how many times she'd rewound the timeline, what Valerie's life had been like in those other futures.

"Have... have we met before?" she whispered.

"Yes," said Shikra. "That is why I chose you. I don't believe I can do this alone."

"And all the other times... You couldn't go back to the past yourself? You had help?"

"The Drakonians didn't know what they were doing when they destroyed the trees," said Shikra. "They thought they were taking away the priestesses' power. But they were denying me my way back. Only three trees can hold your imprint at any one time, and all my trees were burned. I was almost lost for good. I put safeguards in place once I knew what would happen. But we still lose the war. I haven't found a way to win it yet."

"And you think I can..."

"We have limited time to change events." Shikra moved forward, taking her hands. Valerie felt the charge of magic, the power thrumming between them. "But with your help, we have a chance. I have a plan. I will guide you." Her face shone with hope. "Are you ready?"

Ready?

Ready to step into the past, to face an unknown future—to rely on Shikra's knowledge of events, follow her instructions to save the silvertrees, defeat the Drakonian Empire, and restore Maskamere.

Everything she had ever wanted.

Except for the unknown quantity, the most important unknown of all: what would happen to her? What place had the queen designed for Valerie in this future of hers?

Shikra had ruled Maskamere for thirty-two years before the invasion. Perhaps this war wasn't the first time she had turned back the timeline. Maskamere's queens were known for being long-lived. Now she understood why. There was no elixir, but the goldentree did offer a kind of immortality. A chance to cheat death.

And Shikra wanted her help to do it. Why me? The first time this had happened, before the queen knew about the attack at the harvest festival, the war, everything that followed, who had saved her from this limbo? Was it me? Or someone else?

"Valerie?"

She swallowed. "What do you want me to do?"

"Go to Drakon." The queen clasped her hands. "The invasion of Maskamere is conceived, planned, and launched from the Drakonian capital. It's beyond my reach, but not beyond yours. You can use your connection with Lord Avon to convince him not to go to war."

Lord Avon... The queen knew about them, somehow. Perhaps in a different timeline...

"But if I go back," she whispered, "it'll be before we met."

"And you will have the advantage of already knowing him."

"I'll remember and he won't?"

"That's right."

"What about the goldentree's blessing? Will that disappear?"

They'd be going back to her very first blessing. Everything she'd achieved since then wiped out...

Shikra shook her head. "The goldentree is transcendent. Its power lives in you now and forever. It's why you'll remember."

She would remember, and she would keep her power. If the queen was telling the truth.

Something was nagging at her, a thought that occurred now: Avon had been right. The royal family wasn't chosen. Valerie had reached out to the goldentree, and it had offered its gift freely. Maybe she was distantly related to the royal family, but if she counted as a relative, then so did everyone in Maskamere.

The royal family wasn't chosen, but they chose not to share. In all the centuries since Maskamere's founding, there had only ever been one person who wielded the goldentree's power at any one time, and that person was always the queen. When the queen died, her successor stepped in.

Would Shikra truly allow someone else to wield the goldentree's power? Even if Valerie succeeded, if she convinced Avon to prevent the war and changed the course of history, what would happen after that? In the best case scenario she would return to Maskamere as one of the queen's loyal subjects. In the worst...

"Valerie?" Shikra was starting to look concerned. "Valerie, please. This is our chance to save Maskamere. To bring back everyone you care about—your family. Your mother."

The shock of that thought rippled through her, the world blurring and reforming. Everyone she could see through the silvertree portal: her family, friends, the priestesses, the entire village. She could save them all.

Unless they failed, in which case Shikra would wipe the timeline and start again.

Unless Shikra was lying, in which case she wouldn't remember any of this anyway, and the future would be out of her control.

Unless she was a pawn, to be used and discarded, as she suspected Gideon had intended to use her, as Avon had tried to coerce her into working for the Empire. They'd all tried and they'd all failed. She did not want to be a piece in someone else's master plan, even if that someone was the queen.

Valerie took a step back. "How do I know that I can trust you?"

Surprise flashed in Shikra's eyes. The ghostly form flickered, becoming less solid.

"I am your queen. Why wouldn't you trust me?"

"You made me forget," said Valerie. "It was you, wasn't it? The night of the invasion... I helped Glynda to protect the silvertree..."

"If you had remembered, you would have returned to the village. I needed you in the palace."

Not would have, she thought. Did. Shikra must have encountered this problem in a previous timeline and applied a quick but effective fix, which was to simply eliminate the option from Valerie's mind.

And with that, the implications of Shikra's actions became clear. Everything Valerie had done... Everything she thought she had achieved... Not a path she'd taken of her own volition, but one she had been pushed into. An unwitting tool to be wielded as the queen saw fit until she fixed the timeline the way she wanted.

It was one thing to help her, with Anwen providing a source of knowledge that she was hungry for anyway. But to take a choice away from her...

Valerie felt incredibly cheated.

"You manipulated me." Her voice shook. "You lied to me, you lied to all of us. About the goldentree, about the blessing. No one else in Maskamere knows what the trees really do."

"The people cannot know such things." Shikra's eyes were wise and sad. "That knowledge is our burden. We keep it secret to protect everyone. Think of the big picture—this is about the future of Maskamere. We can't let it fall into tyranny and squalor."

"No," she said. "No, I agree. But I have the power of the goldentree now. I'll save Maskamere myself."

And she turned away, skimming through the vibrant air, facing the light of the goldentree. She sensed a surge of anger as Shikra followed.

"What are you doing? You'd condemn Maskamere? You won't even save your own family?"

"My family is dead," she said steadily. "You should be too."

Moving without a body was a strange thing, a change of perspective rather than a physical exertion of the limbs. Her phantom feet didn't touch the forest floor. The goldentree hill loomed before her. She could see herself—

"I'm sorry, Valerie. But I can't let you go."

Icy hands gripped her. The queen's magic—her will—closed around her like a vice. She froze. And at the same time, Shikra's ghostly figure ascended to the goldentree, to her body...

No.

She fought, lashing out. My will. My power. My body.

"We have to save Maskamere. We have to go back."

She thought of how the rough bark felt against her palms, the solid press of the ground beneath her feet, the air on her skin, the breath in her lungs. Everything that it felt to be human and to have a body...

Her body rushed towards her. Or she rushed towards her body.

And then, abruptly, she fell into the chamber. Valerie flailed, disoriented, as the great stone boulder rolled back into place, and the magical seal began to reform. She heard footsteps, grunts, the clashing of swords—

No time had passed, she thought in shock. And then, with equal shock, her body leapt up. With a flick of her hand, Avon's sword was knocked from his grip. Another flick, and he fell to his knees.

But she hadn't done any of it. Panic filled her and then was swept away.

Leave this to me.

"Kill him, brother," her voice commanded.

Bakra's eyes widened. "Shikra."

He stepped over Avon, who was straining against the invisible force pinning him to the ground, eyes wide with fear. Shikra watched, triumphant. Valerie watched, terrified, a passenger in her own body.

Bakra raised his sword...

No.

She wrenched—

Shikra's spell vanished for only a moment, but it was enough. Avon grabbed the hilt of his sword, and then her magic struck again, but the blade flashed, and with a guttural cry he brought up his sword to block Bakra's strike. He kicked up, foot connecting with Bakra's knee, knocking the prince down.

Air blasted from her fingertips, but it did nothing against the sword. Avon rose to his feet and cleaved Bakra's head from his shoulders.

Her mouth screamed. Avon turned to her. He was bloodied, limping, a bruise darkening his jaw.

Her fingers snapped and fire billowed out like the breath of a dragon, but Avon raised his sword and it ate up the flames.

No, she tried to say. No, I'm still in here!

But her mouth wasn't hers. Her body shook, torn between two wills fighting for control, and then Avon drove his blade through her heart.

She stared at him. His eyes met hers unblinking, fierce, blue, and wet with tears, but his mouth was a grim line.

Idiot! Why—

Her heart gave one final shudder. The pain was overwhelming.

Then there was no pain at all.