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I frown, my skin prickling with dread. “What do you mean?” I ask. “Because he’s the Regent of Lies?”

Raven’s eyes soften at me, as if he knows something I don’t. His hand comes up to touch my cheek. The brush of his fingers is light, barely there, but it is enough to make me tremble. I can feel the power of his immortal soul through our bond, an overwhelming current of heat. It beckons to me, and in this moment, I want nothing more than for him to be nearer. It is the instinct of every living being to be close to life—plants tilting toward the sun, creatures drawn to a light, humans gathering around a fire. And so I, too, am drawn all the same, my survival dependent on him.

Through the fog of my still-recovering mind, a memory returns to me of the look that had been on Raven’s face right after the Wraith’s attack. The strain in his voice when he held me to his chest and picked me up.

His gaze now is so human and hesitant, as if he is searching within me for something else. And for an instant, I see him, his mortal self, the version that had been frozen in time the instant he became a Harbinger, and then chosen as a god. He is still this boy, whoever the boy once was, and the glimmer of that young soul twists my heart.

I take a deep breath. “What do you know about Étienne?” I whisper. “Tell me, please.”

After a moment, Raven looks away from me and toward the hall, where I can glimpse part of the Eternal Tree’s curling white branches.

“Come,” he says, and rises, offering me his hand. “Follow me.”

22

In the night, the entire atrium is awash in nothing but silver light from the swirling galaxies above, and the Eternal Tree seems to shimmer in this dim space, glowing white.

I follow in Raven’s wake, slightly self-conscious in my thin satin shift. As we reach the bottom of the stairs and step toward the tree, my patron god takes my hand. Through his touch, I can sense the churning immortal soul within him hungering for the mortal energy in my body, and the sensation makes my skin tingle.

“Step forward,” Raven says quietly, guiding me closer to the tree.

I dip my feet into the cool dark waters surrounding the base, then across the soft, silver moss, where I find myself standing in the midst of its pale, curling branches. Raven joins me, stopping at my side before the porcelain-white trunk.

Just as during the night of my confirmation, I can feel the pull of the tree itself, can almost hear the whispers of infinite generations of lives.

“Place your hand on the trunk,” Raven tells me.

I glance expectantly at him, then take a deep breath and do as he says.

The feeling is instantaneous. Millions of souls, threads of light called to my own just as I’m called to theirs, sparking against my palm. It is such an overwhelming sensation that I want to yank my hand away, just as I’d done the first time. But I grit my teeth and stay in place, letting myself sink into their embrace.

Then Raven presses his palm against the cool bark, right next to my own.

I feel a sudden strengthening of one particular soul sparking against my hand. The tug in my heart from my patron god envelops me, shrouding my vision in white.

I blink, looking around as the ground under me fades into snow, into nothing. The atrium itself disappears from view, until only Raven and I are standing alone in a white space. With a start, I realize that I am now within the Eternal Tree, as if my soul has been called inside to witness the lives that reside here.

The feeling of being in this sacred place is overwhelming, standing in the midst of not only every soul that has ever existed, but every single one of their memories, the threads of their lives, everything that ever mattered to each of them. I hold my breath and let myself submerge in the sensation, to feel the infinite stretch of joy and sorrow and heart of humanity.

“My name was Arthur,” Raven tells me.

I turn to him and see a different kind of light in his gray eyes, some remnant of who he must once have been. He starts walking down this white space, and with no other choice, I follow alongside him, fighting back the strange feeling of stepping into a seemingly endless nothing.

“Do you remember who Arthur was?” I ask him.

“I was a soldier, centuries ago,” he says. His voice is calm and deep, but under those layers is a bleakness and grief that sounds resoundingly … mortal.

I try to picture a young soldier not far from my own age, barely old enough to count as a man, running across some ancient battlefield during a war long buried by history. I imagine him dying among others, stabbed in the heart, bleeding out, thinking desperately of home. I see him kneeling before the previous god of Death and asking for more life, making the same bargain I had made.

“How did it happen?” I ask him.

Raven nods at the white space before us. And just like that, as if we’d been heading toward a destination this whole time, the space around us starts to open up, until the brightness looks like the illumination of light at dawn.

“The Eternal Tree stores every soul who has ever been born and reborn,” Raven tells me as the scene surrounds us. “And that includes mine.”

As he says it, we step out of the light and into his past.

There are no skyscrapers here, no city streets or holiday lights. I find myself staring instead at a silver ribbon of water cutting through a land scarred with trenches and fire. Our surroundings sharpen, sounds and sights and carnage coming into clear focus. Overhead, smoke obscures the sky. The air seems hot and unnatural. And all around us is the wail of warfare, steel against steel, the distant scream of dying horses, a cacophony of soldiers shouting desperately, the sound of sobbing, the clatter of boots and chain mail.