by Sara Holland
It feels like a paradox. If Oasis is really dying like Nahteran says, of course the residents deserve to live. Everyone does.
But the answer can’t be letting the Silver Prince blow holes in the barrier between the worlds. I still have nightmares from the fight with him in the tunnels. I can still see the cruelty in his eyes as he called wind and fire to his command, ready to end my life so he could take over Havenfall. I don’t think peaceful coexistence is his endgame. Even when I thought him my ally at the beginning of the summer, he was always a more “the ends justify the means” kind of guy. Not to mention he’s a lot of the muscle behind the soul trade. It almost makes it worse that he doesn’t care about the suffering of the Solarians. They’re just vectors to him, just tools to weaken the boundaries between Byrn and everything else.
It’s not even 8:00 a.m., and I don’t expect Taya to text back anytime soon, as I stand at the window, thinking over the paradox. Brekken’s unbending morality, or Nahteran’s farsighted acquiescence? Mom or the armor?
My phone buzzes, thankfully snapping me out of a thought spiral that can’t go anywhere good.
Great minds! Just thinking about you. Walk on the grounds before breakfast?
Just thinking about you. My eyes fix on those words a little too long, my cheeks heating. Thinking about me? In what kind of way?
I push the flustered feelings away. Taya’s spent the last few weeks learning how she fits in a whole other world. I’m probably the last thing on her mind. Or whatever fragile thing—friendship? something else?—was growing between us before everything happened. Before I discovered the soul trade, before she saved me from the Silver Prince, and before she got sucked into Solaria.
I feel guilty thinking about Taya, since Brekken and I have discussed being together. But it’s not like I’m just going to never talk with Taya. She’s my friend too. She saved my life, and I thought I would never see her again. But even as I’m trying to justify what’s running around my head, I know I’m not being fair to Brekken. Still …
Just thinking about you.
I meet her in the front hall, where she’s waiting with two mugs of travel coffee in hand. She’s wearing a new pair of skinny jeans and her signature bomber jacket. After she went through the Solarian door, I made sure Willow kept her room just as it was in case she came back. Even when it was a long shot. And now she’s here; she’s back.
Morning light streams through the windows and lands softly on her. I take the coffee, and we walk outside in silence, the sky a Creamsicle orange and mist still clinging to the grass.
Her presence feels like a comfort, a contrast to all the moments I’ve spent with Nahteran so far—which have been joyful, but also difficult and fraught. It’s easier to be with Taya. She challenges me—but we’re in agreement about the important things. Yet … I don’t ask her what she’d vote to do about Mom. I think I need to figure that out for myself.
By some unspoken mutual agreement, we start meandering toward the gardens. This early, the grounds are empty of delegates. We could be all alone in the world, just us and the mountains and the flowers, their bright colors muted by the mist.
“Nahteran has to come around eventually, right?” I tug my sleeves down over my hands. There’s the slightest hint of fall in the air. It’s not really that cold, but I shiver thinking of the haunted look in Nahteran’s eyes last night, the history he hinted at of his growing up in Byrn. “He knows better than anyone that the Silver Prince is evil.”
Taya looks at me with sadness in her eyes. “That’s not the whole story, though,” she says softly. “How many of us stay in a bad place because it’s all we know?”
My heart twists. “Let’s talk about something else,” I say, not wanting to think about my brother anymore, how he might have suffered and how he might never be the same. “I still haven’t heard much about Solaria. What was it like there? Were you happy?”
The last question slips out without my quite meaning it to. I wanted to keep it light, surface. But I should have remembered, it’s never like that with Taya. It’s as if her very presence scrapes the protective filter from me, pulls out the deepest questions swimming in my soul.
Taya takes her time answering. We’re in the midst of the flower beds now, in a section full of riotous, star-shaped green flowers. I don’t know which world these come from, but I know that every year, they bloom only when someone strokes their petals. A few bumblebees drift lazily from bloom to bloom, their hum underlying the smattering of birdsong coming from the trees.
Taya kneels down, facing the side of the path, and I stop walking. I watch curiously as she scoops up a handful of earth in her hands and straightens back up, holding the dirt carefully in her cupped fingers.
“What am I looking at?” I ask.
Taya flattens her hands so that the dirt spreads out over her skin, her eyes fixed on it. Following her gaze, I see, to my surprise, that there are myriad colors hidden in the dark of the earth. Red, blue, green, gold, white, purple grains mixed in with the black. She carefully picks out one pebble that looks like it could be unpolished sapphire and brushes off the dirt before plunking it into the palm of my hand.
“I noticed this when I was working in the gardens,” she says. “In Solaria, there are miles of blue stone beaches. All blue, under a gold sky.”
The picture takes shape in my mind. “It sounds beautiful,” I say in a hushed voice.
“I think delegates from all the Realms have brought their own soil to these gardens,” Taya says. There’s a current of feeling in her voice that I can’t identify. She sticks her hands in her pockets and gives me that lopsided smile. “But Solaria, yeah. Yeah, I was happy there.”
My heart twists in a weird happy-sad dance. Of course, duh, I want her to be happy. But there’s a not so small spiteful part of me that wants her to be happy on Earth. With me.
“I have a history there,” Taya says. “An extended family, even. That’s something I never had on Earth. I was scared at first to not know anything about the world. The people were kind to me, but I still felt out of place. And I missed you.”
That makes my breath catch. I’m trying to think of a reply when a snapped twig sound behind us makes me jump. I spin around to see Brekken striding down the path toward us.
My stomach drops, but not in the good way that it usually does when I see him. He looks like he’s here on business.
“Maddie,” he says when he’s within earshot, his voice clipped. “Taya.”
“What’s wrong?” I ask, foreboding gathering heavy inside my chest. What now?
“Maddie,” he says, his voice strangely clipped. “Can I talk to you alone?”
19
Taya leaves us without argument. She can tell when something’s wrong just as well as I can.
Once she’s gone, I don’t know if Brekken means to keep on walking or not, but the sudden silence and stillness that descends is awful. So I turn to the path again, beckoning for Brekken to come along.
We continue through the gardens. Brekken clearly has something to say, and I can tell from his manner that it’s not good. I’ve been so wrapped up in Taya and Nahteran that I’ve scarcely spoken to Brekken, and it’s just now occurring to me how much that must hurt. I know it would have hurt me, if the roles were reversed. Guilt and sadness sneak through me even before he speaks.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “About how I acted about Nahteran. How I told you not to trust him.”
I don’t know what I expected to hear, but it wasn’t that. Brekken hasn’t been acting sorry. He’s been cold and distant to Nahteran this whole time, and to Taya and me too, by association. I cock my head, confused.
“Why do you say that? Do you trust him now?”
Brekken smiles, but it has a wooden quality to it. His fists are clenched. “Not entirely, no, I’ll admit. Something about all this—the Silver Prince and the armor and your mom—it doesn’t feel right to me.”
“Then why say anything?” I challenge. “Wh
y apologize if you’re just going to do the same thing?”
Brekken looks out over the mountains, his jaw working slightly. “I never wanted to hurt you, Maddie. And it’s clear that I have. I want to make you happy.”
“Well, I gotta tell you I’m not happy,” I snap. “Don’t you get that Nahteran has more reason to hate the Silver Prince than any of us? We only had to deal with him for a month. Nahteran has been with him for ten years.”
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of!” Brekken’s voice is layered with anger and distress. He stops walking and turns to face me square on. I stop too.
“Loyalties can change, Maddie,” he continues. “Remember Bram? He was a Solarian working for the Silver Prince too.”
I flinch at the memory of Bram—the man posing as the Silver Prince’s manservant at Havenfall, who was secretly a Solarian. Whom the Silver Prince murdered, slaughtering him in his animal form so that with his spilled blood, the Prince could open the door to Solaria and trigger chaos at Havenfall. And to top it all off, it looked like a monster had killed him, stirring up the hatred of Solarians in the rest of us.
“Nate is nothing like Bram.”
“Nate,” Brekken echoes, the word dripping with skepticism and even contempt. “Still the nickname, even after all this?”
That sets me off. I step back from him. “You don’t understand,” I hiss. “You’ve always had a family. You’ve never been alone.”
“Maddie.” Brekken’s voice is soft, like he’s trying to comfort me, but it’s not working. “I understand you’ve been lonely. But you’ve got to see what’s right in front of your eyes—”
“My eyes are open,” I retort. “What I see, what I think, is that every step of the way this summer, we’ve found out that the rabbit hole goes deeper than we realize.”
I take a deep breath. I’m angry, and I don’t want to cry. I can’t believe that my best friend, the boy I love, thinks the worst of my brother. I can’t let Brekken talk me into believing it too. I’ve lost faith in so much that I used to hold sacred. If I lose hope for Nahteran, I think I might crumble into dust.
Something shifts in Brekken’s face, and I see sympathy creeping in. He comes close, wraps his arms around me, and pulls me into his chest. I stand still, not moving to embrace him in return. I feel emptied out.
“Nothing that happens now will change your memories,” he says softly. “You’ll always have those. He can’t touch them.”
“I know,” I murmur. But it’s more of an auto-response than anything else. Because I don’t care about the memories, not really. Those are behind me, already tarnished by years of lies and silence. What I want now is to have my brother back, whatever that will look like. A small voice inside reminds me that my brother doesn’t exactly want to stay.
“I didn’t even come here to talk about Nahteran,” Brekken says. “It’s not about him at all. It’s about you. I might not trust him, but he’s your brother and I shouldn’t have asked you to turn away from him. So, I’m sorry.”
“Okay …” I bite the inside of my cheek. “Apology accepted, I guess.”
“Thank you.” He steps away from me, but I can tell he’s still holding something back.
We’re still in the gardens, on the outskirts now, and the air is heavy with the scent of late summer flowers. But the color and life seems to have faded from my surroundings, replaced by a sense of menace.
“I wanted to talk to you for another reason,” he says. “We’ve received a message from Fiordenkill.” He closes his eyes for a second as if he really doesn’t want to say what he’s about to say. But then he opens them again and goes on.
“Back in Winterkill, when we used the armor to create a doorway back to Haven … Apparently it continued to grow and swallowed half of Cadius’s castle before Nahteran took the armor out of range and it closed up again.”
“Good,” I say. “I wish it swallowed the whole thing.”
Even though that’s kind of scary to hear, seeing as that same armor is currently sitting inside Havenfall.
Brekken doesn’t smile. “Cadius is bringing charges against us for the destruction of his castle and the theft of the armor. Myr ordered that someone in our company return to stand trial for it.”
I almost laugh out of relief. Out of all the consequences we could have faced for our excursion into Winterkill—Cadius being mad at us is one I’m completely okay with.
“Is that all? Too bad, then. It’s not like they can come into Havenfall and drag us back.”
“No,” Brekken replies. His face and voice are somber. “But it will disrupt the peace with Fiordenkill if we don’t.”
“Can’t Princess Enetta help us?” I point out. “She helped us get into Fiordenkill. She’s on our side.”
“Graylin is talking to her now,” he says. “But I doubt it. She’s only one royal out of the whole family. The rest, as I understand it, are sympathetic to Winterkill. Besides …”
Brekken’s soldier posture breaks down a little, his head hanging down. He looks … defeated.
“People died, Maddie,” he says heavily. “Guests at the party. Servants. And much of the soul-silver was lost.”
That steals the breath out of my lungs. I don’t care much about the guests, to be honest. They knew what Cadius was doing and decided to party with him anyway. But the servants had no choice in being there. They were trapped. Just like the Solarian souls bound up in the hoard of silver.
“Someone should be accountable for that,” Brekken says.
I struggle to catch my breath. I don’t know that I disagree, but I don’t know what to say. Except … “What should we do?”
Brekken looks down. “I’m going to go back. I’m going to stand trial.”
My heart plummets into my feet. I can’t help taking a step back, like someone’s hit me. “You can’t.”
“You can’t,” Brekken corrects me, his words toneless. “I can. Me or Graylin, and would you rather it be him?”
“No!” I yell, loud enough for the mountains to swallow my voice and toss it back toward us as an echo. “I don’t want either of you to go! What happens if you lose? If they convict you?”
I don’t know much about Myr’s criminal justice system, but I know enough about ours to be very, very afraid.
“Cadius wants the death penalty, obviously,” Brekken says. “But I’ll have a chance to speak. I’ll tell them about the soul trade, what we saw at the castle. It’s not a done deal.”
His stoic, almost casual tone tears at my insides. “It’s too risky. Just stay here, hide out, Brekken. Please.” I draw a shuddery breath. “Stay safe. If someone comes after you, I’ll tell them you left, I’ll think of something—”
“The other things I said still stand.”
He rubs one hand over his eyes. His uniform is rumpled, and there’s a faint layer of copper stubble on his jaw. On the Brekken breakdown scale, that’s practically the equivalent of anyone else running naked and raving through the streets. I can’t believe I hadn’t noticed how close he was to falling apart.
“The peace with Fiordenkill is still at stake,” he says. “And all that work you did to bring Solaria back into the fold. I’d hate to see Havenfall lose access to another Realm just because we were hasty and careless,” he adds with a small smile.
He’s trying to make light, I think, but I don’t want any of it.
“Then I should go,” I say, trying to sound braver than I feel. “The whole thing was my idea.”
“You can’t,” he shoots back. “It will all have been for nothing if we send the armor right back into Winterkill’s hands. And you won’t get far without it. You’ll drop dead after an hour in Fiordenkill, and Cadius won’t get his trial, and then Graylin or I will have to go in anyway.”
He lifts one hand, tentatively, and cups my cheek gently. “It makes sense for me to go, Maddie. You know it does.”
Deep down, some part of me knows he’s right. But I won’t admit it, can’t admit it. The wo
rds physically won’t come out. I put my hand over his, pressing it to my skin, trying to quell the panic speeding my heart.
“There’s no way you’ll get a fair trial.” I think with a surge of fear of the luxury at Cadius’s castle, how he seemed to have the Fiorden nobles in his pocket.
“I do think so, actually,” Brekken says. “A lot of Fiordens don’t like Winterkill and are against the soul trade. They’ll hear me out.”
But that doesn’t seem like enough. “I just …” My voice cracks, forcing me to drop it into a whisper. “I don’t want to lose you.”
“You might not,” he says, almost cheerfully. “I’ll argue my case. They might even decide to execute Cadius instead.”
I laugh in spite of myself, but it comes out tinged with a sob. “ ‘You might not.’ That’s not really a comfort, you know.”
Brekken shrugs. “After everything with the Heiress, I promised myself I’d never lie to you again.”
“When do you have to go?” I ask. My chest hurts, like Cadius of Winterkill has reached out across the realms separating us and has closed cold fingers around my heart, tugging, tugging.
“Three days,” Brekken says.
He grabs my hand and starts walking down the sunny path again. It’s weird how much his touch makes me instinctively relax, despite how horribly wrong everything still is. The tension in my shoulders unwinds, my heart starting to beat at a normalish pace again.
“So I’ll have time to help out with the Silver Prince,” he adds. “Whatever we decide to do.”
It’s an unwelcome reminder of that terrible problem that we’re no closer to solving. More than twenty-four hours have passed since Nahteran first got the Silver Prince’s message. One of our three days, gone without anything to show for it.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. I tense, already going to pull it out. Anytime my phone’s buzzed in the last couple of days, my instinct is always that it’s news about Mom. On the lock screen is a text from Marcus.
