Orison

Chapter One: Aurianna

CHAPTER ONE

AURIANNA

He took my heart the night he killed my grandmother, the night I swore the Blood Oath, binding my life to his death.

Even outside the glade, I heard the shriek and screech of metal, followed by the silence of a predator that has leaped but not yet landed. The other dryads would not welcome my presence, but a sense of growing dread pushed me, so I threw myself into the breeze. Swifter than my legs could run, the air currents carried me through the forest to the rocky walls that sheltered my people's hidden glade.

When I entered the glade, no one frowned or turned away with mocking smiles and knowing stares. Instead, they all looked up, watching as a human's car plunged the long distance toward the ground, falling from the hard black river above.

Time slowed.

Time froze.

Time exploded back to life as the car crashed into my grandmother's sycamore tree with the root-chilling snap of splintering wood. The force of the collision threw the human body free of the metal shell. Then Grandmother's death cries floated through the air, thin as tattered gossamer.

Unlike me, she had rooted and changed. As a hamadryad, her soul was housed in the wounded sycamore tree.

"Grandmother!" I pushed past the gathering dryads and curious satyrs. Her whispered moans echoed through the glade, repeated from leaf to leaf by greenspeak, the shared voice of the forest.

The car had smashed into her tree near the base. The trunk remained upright, but a gaping wound now wept streams of spring-quickened sap.

I clutched at the trunk, my fingers slipping across the sycamore's smooth surface as I searched for her spirit inside. "Grandmother!"

She did not answer. Her silence kindled a frantic emptiness inside of me.

I thrust my toes into the forest soil, impatient at the eternal seconds it took for each toe to stretch and split into a web of roots. I had to save her. She was all I had. With an urgency that shook me, I pulled up great waves of the earth's nourishing power, pouring it through my hands into the broken tree.

She responded to the flood of energy with only the faintest rustle of thought. You cannot heal this wound, Aurianna.

"Grandmother! Do not leave me." I poured even more energy toward her.

It is the way of things. Listen. I have little time and I must speak. Forgive me, Aurianna. I have not . . . been kind to you. I allowed your mother's shame to make me cold and distant.

"We can love each other now." For as long as I had lived, her lack of love mattered more than anything else.

Listen.

Even in death, she surrendered no warmth, betrayed no tenderness. Her coldness stabbed deep inside of me. Somehow, it always managed to create a new wound among the old scars.

Your mother—

My heart jumped to attention like a rabbit's ears. Mother. That word opened up a yearning far deeper than my current grief or past sadness.

"Tell me! Please." I pressed hard against her trunk, straining to listen while flooding more and more energy into her dying tree. She could not last long. But perhaps long enough to explain the secret shame that had blighted my life.

Your mother—Grandmother's voice faded as her tree's life flowed away. Too late, she gasped. Orison.

"No!" I stretched each root, gulping more and more energy from the earth, hurling it at her until the small plants around me wilted and died, drained of life. Grandmother remained silent. "Tell me of my mother. Please." I pounded on her trunk now, beating it with my fists "Please!"