Persephone's Orchard (The Chrysomelia Stories) by Molly Ringle

just be thankful to be alive.”
    The ache in Sophie’s chest told her a similar truth: as Grete, she had loved Karl. But she had been married, with children, and couldn’t ever be with him. The tragedy, the sweetness, and the increasing conviction that she really had been Grete (and he really had been Karl) all began swaying her toward forgiving him.
    She could see herself searching him out too, if she had this knowledge and he didn’t. Not that she’d admit it out loud.
    “I’m sorry I hit you,” she said, grudgingly.
    “It’s all right. You had good reason.”
    “Grete and Karl—is that why you went looking for me? Because we were them?”
    Adrian hummed a dismissive note, glancing up into the tree. “They’re only the tip of the iceberg. Come up here, let’s sit.” Before she could accept, he had hooked his arm around her middle and hoisted her up to where the branches split out from the trunk, six or seven feet off the ground. Though this time she anticipated his strength, it still impressed her. He lifted her as easily as she would have lifted a kitten.
    As she seized the nearest branch, he pushed against the soles of her shoes, and she scrambled into the tree’s central cup. It was soft under her hands, carpeted with moss and small ferns. She chose a seat on a mostly-flat area with one of the branches against her back. Adrian pulled himself up and sat opposite her. They both bent their knees up, but the confines of the oak crowded their feet against each other. From below the tree came the contented sounds of Kiri chewing on a stick.
    “We can sit in the bus if you’d rather,” he said. “I promise I won’t drive it anywhere.”
    “I’ll take my chances with the tree.”
    “All right. So…” He spread his palms over his knees. “We’ve both lived many, many lives and seen all kinds of things. But there’s one particular life, a long time ago, that’s especially important. It’s the main reason I came looking for you, and got you to drink the juice, and it’s the one I want you to remember.”
    She closed her eyes to concentrate. “Okay. I don’t—everything’s all jumbled in my head, but—how far back? What year?”
    “Uh…I can’t be sure exactly. A few thousand years.”
    Her eyes flew open. “ What ?”
    “And here’s the trouble: you won’t be able to remember it right here, today. Your memories only just got opened up, and the first ones to come back are the most recent.”
    “So it’s going to take days, weeks—longer?—before I get to this ancient life you’re talking about?”
    “Not necessarily. See…” He shifted in the tree, straightening his back. His fingers danced upward from his kneecaps as he explained. “This huge collection of memories, of lifetimes your soul has lived through, it’s like a big bag of—of pomegranates.”
    “Enough with the pomegranates.”
    “Oranges, then. Now, the first orange you pull out is the one on top, the last one that was put in.”
    “Yes…”
    “You could sit down with that orange, peel it, pull it into sections, examine it all day. Or you could put it aside, reach into the bag, and get the next one. Then put that aside, and take out the next, and the next, and so on, until you get to this amazing, shining, huge, golden orange. That’s the one you sit down and open up.”
    “How will I know which one it is?” she asked.
    “Oh, you’ll know.”
    She grunted in impatience.
    “Although,” Adrian added, and drummed his fingers on his knees, thinking. “Yeah. Okay. I can give you a hint. Another thing the pomegranate makes you remember is the time you spent between lives.”
    “Between?” She suddenly understood. “In the Underworld?”
    He smiled. “You’re even calling it the right name now.”
    Whispers of images sprouted at the back of her mind, ideas and memories moving like shadows, just out of reach. She sighed. “Great. Now I’m remembering the language of the Underworld, too.”
    He answered in