Sweep of the Heart (Innkeeper Chronicles #5)(128)

“She owes me. She can wait a few minutes under the heavy guard.” As soon as this was over and if everything went well, everyone could return to the inn. “Is Wilmos conscious?”

“Yes, and pissed off as hell.”

We did save him. I should’ve been happy but right now it barely registered.

Sean waved me over. I started toward the door slowly.

“Two inns can’t occupy the same space,” Tony said. “Best case scenario, both die. Worst case, we collapse reality. If this happens, I can’t contain it.”

A long branch slipped from inside the door and waited, hovering.

“Dina, even if you bring it into the inn, you won’t be able to get it to root,” Tony said.

“I’m not trying to get it to root.”

We were almost to the door. The branch of Gertrude Hunt shivered a few feet away. Sean patted it, reassuring it.

“I’m going to graft it.”

Tony swore again.

The branch reached out to me. The sprout uncoiled itself from around my neck and stretched toward it. It was almost as if the two of them knew what they had to do.

I held my breath and reached out with my hand.

Gertrude Hunt brushed against my fingers.

Magic shot through me like an arrow from Gertrude Hunt, straight into the cutting, and back to the inn. The world vanished. A star-studded darkness blossomed in front of me with a glowing nebulous vortex unfurling at its center. An electric current of magic strummed through me, vibrating in every bone and tendon.

The darkness vanished, and I saw the branch of Gertrude Hunt slide across me back into the inn, with the sprout growing from it.

The branch slipped into the inn. A magic pulse rocked Gertrude Hunt.

Sean disappeared into the depth of inn.

I sprinted to the doorway and dove through it, Tony right behind me. The door slammed shut behind us.

The inn quaked and rumbled. The cutting was moving through it, a knot of magic sliding further away. We chased it, through the inn’s many rooms, through the hallways and the walls, to the back, to the plain hallway where a nascent door waited.

Reality exploded open before our eyes. The wall in front of us disintegrated, fracturing into exuberant sunlight. A stretch of flat ground lay ahead, sheathed in soft green and blue grass. A hundred yards ahead the ground ended, and beyond it an ocean of air stretched, with a grassy plain at its bottom. Groups of white stone mesas thrust from it toward the sky, crowned with turquoise trees. We were on top of a plateau.

A root slid under our feet, burrowing deep into the soil. It sped toward the cliff. The ground erupted. Branches spiraled up, high, higher, and higher. Hunter green leaves burst open. White flowers as big as my head opened, showing a whirl of pink stamens topped with a bright yellow clump of carpels.

A colossal magnolia, taller than the tallest redwood, wider than the widest sequoia, spread its giant branches over the plateau. Connected to the inn, and yet separate from it, but vibrant and so much alive. It felt like Magnolia Green. It was more than a tree but less than an inn. It grew from a Gertrude Hunt root, and both were well. Relief washed over me. I slumped forward, and Sean caught me and grinned.

“We can never tell anyone about this,” Tony said.

“Are you speaking as an ad-hal or a friend?” Sean asked him.

“Both. Nobody can know. The Assembly will… I don’t even know what they will do, but we won’t like it.”

“Then they don’t need to know,” Sean said.

A beautiful bird cried out overhead and landed on the magnolia’s mighty branches. I had never seen one like it.

“Where are we?” I wondered.

Tony was looking out past the tree, where twin moons rose, one larger and tinted with purple, and the other small and orange.

“This is…” he said.

“Daesyn,” Sean finished for him. “Home planet of House Krahr.”

The End