by Sara Holland
Come to my rooms please. Need to talk to you.
I show it to Brekken, who nods in understanding and turns back toward the inn. “I’ll walk you there.”
“We’re not done talking about this,” I say, catching up. “I want to make sure you have the very best testimony in the history of Myr. We’ll get Graylin to write a speech for you. You can practice it before you leave.”
Brekken’s lips twitch in a smile—a genuine one, for the first time since he found me on the path. “Sounds good.” He takes my hand and squeezes it tight. “I want to come back to you.”
And with that, my heart flip-flops for the umpteenth time.
When I get to Marcus’s living room, he’s not alone. Nahteran is sitting on the couch with a mug of that weird tea he likes, looking tired and anxious. He’s wearing a black sweater clearly borrowed from Marcus, judging by its bagginess and how the sleeve rides up his wrist when he waves to me.
By the counter, Marcus turns to me. He has a mug of coffee ready for me, too, and his face is grave as he hands it to me. “Maddie, thanks for coming.”
“Of course.” I take it and sit down next to Nahteran, an ominous weight settling onto my chest.
Marcus sits on the edge of the armchair across from us, his hands on his knees. No drink for him. His hair is messy as if he’s been running his hands nervously through it all night.
“I don’t want to beat around the bush,” he says. His voice is hoarse. He used to be a smoker, back before I was born, and sometimes the gravelly edge still comes out. “I’ve been up all night thinking about Sylvia. About your mom. About what she would do if she were in my shoes.”
I feel my muscles tense up. Suddenly, I know what he’s going to say and dread fills me. Please don’t say it. Please don’t—
“She wouldn’t want us to put the whole world at risk just for her sake,” Marcus says. “We’re not going to give the armor to the Silver Prince.”
I go numb. The world around me fills with a buzzing, gray static. The only thing I’m aware of is Nahteran going rigid next to me. Meaning this is news to him too.
“But—”
The word falls from my lips without my deciding to say it, a wild exclamation. Yet it dies off, goes nowhere. I don’t know why I feel so horrified and repulsed. It’s not like I had decided where I stood; I hadn’t been set on trading the armor. If anything, after my talk with Nahteran last night on the balcony, I was leaning the same way as Marcus. So why is my chest burning with a trapped scream of protest?
“Look.” Marcus swipes the back of his hand across his face, catching a couple of tears before they can slide down his cheeks. “I’m not happy about this. Obviously. But I know your mom. And we can’t—we can’t throw everyone on Earth under the bus just to save her.” He looks from me to Nahteran and back. “So we sit tight. We protect the armor and keep guarding the doorway to Oasis. As long as the Silver Prince is trapped there, we’re safe. Havenfall is safe.” His voice trembles. “Earth is safe.”
I stare back at him, feeling like I’m floating above my body. I had been stuck on the knife’s edge before, too trapped to step off in either direction, to make a choice, even in my own mind. But somehow, Marcus articulating his decision in such stark terms has broken my paralysis and I suddenly know what I think.
That this can’t happen.
I won’t let it happen.
I won’t let Mom die.
I half expect to start crying as soon as I close the door to Marcus’s suite behind me, but I don’t. Instead, my whole body feels electrified, fired with energy and purpose. I start walking in a random direction, feeling like I’ll explode if I don’t burn it off. Nahteran falls into step next to me.
“There has to be another way,” I say in a low voice, not looking at him, but trusting that he hears me. “There just has to.”
“Sure, there is,” he says. “Giving the Silver Prince the armor. But how can we do that without Marcus finding out? And do you really want to?”
“No,” I hiss. Fury—not at Nahteran or Marcus, but at our circumstances, at the Silver Prince—throbs beneath my skin. “There’s something else. There has to be.”
My feet are taking us up, up, up. I scarcely notice the inn passing by around me. The first floor, the dormitories, meandering delegates, the staff quarters. All the way up to the top floor, the glass-walled room where a lifetime ago I had a heart-to-heart with the Silver Prince.
The problems I faced then—Marcus unconscious, knowing the delegates thought I was out of my depth as a substitute, what I thought was a monster on the grounds—felt so overwhelming then. So simple now. But somehow I feel like it’ll be easier to think if I’m high up. If I can see everything around me.
Nahteran follows me wordlessly, and I’m grateful. It’s nice to be trusted by someone, even if I don’t entirely trust myself.
A few moments after we reach the glass room and close the door behind us, it opens again. I whip around to see Taya in the doorway. She looks from Nahteran to me, her brow creased in concern.
“Sorry,” she says. “I just saw you guys across the hall downstairs. You looked upset, so I thought …” She trails off, her eyes wide as she looks around.
I suppose that the view must be breathtaking. I can’t really see it, can’t focus on the real world. My mind’s eye is filled up with a memory of the Silver Prince, his handsome face and metallic eyes, the machinations that were always churning behind them.
“Come in, then,” Nahteran says.
Distantly, I hear him relay to Taya the conversation in Marcus’s office, the decision our uncle made on everyone’s behalf. I hear that he’s angry.
“You know the Silver Prince best, Nahteran,” I say when he’s finished, turning to them. The adrenaline sparking through my body has faded a bit, replaced by cold, consuming determination. “What are his weak spots?”
But it’s Taya who answers first. “Pride,” she says after a long silence.
She looks at me. At Nahteran. At me again. “Right?”
Nahteran nods wordlessly.
“So we lean on his pride,” I say, testing the words out. “We let him think he’s won … How?”
“Fake armor,” Taya suggests, as easily as if she’s had the answer all along. “We make fake armor and trade it to him for your mom.”
Nahteran and I both stare at her. My blood is racing.
There has to be a way we can get Mom back without handing over the phoenix flame armor. And maybe, just maybe, Taya’s hit on it.
20
The plan comes together quickly, all three of us fired up by the possibility of actually doing something. I know, and I think Nahteran and Taya do too, that this is a hell of a long shot. But at least we have a chance.
We pause at the top of the stairs. We each have separate jobs to do, but I don’t want to part ways just yet. Being with Taya and Nahteran like this gives me hope for what seems like the first time in forever. Maybe everything will be okay.
But we don’t have time to waste. We head downstairs silently. Nahteran peels off first, on the fourth floor that serves as the staff quarters. While Willow and Marcus and everyone else is at dinner, he’s going to steal the original phoenix flame armor from the three safes. We’ll need it to create the reproduction. And then to open a doorway between here and Oasis.
Taya heads off to the kitchen. In one of her jacket pockets is my key ring, the Innkeeper’s keys that will get her into the locked closet in the kitchen, where Willow keeps the gold plates and cutlery we use to celebrate the start of the summit. We need gold—not enough to recreate the entire suit of phoenix flame armor, but enough to gild its surface so that when we hand it over to the Silver Prince, it’ll look close enough to the real thing.
I continue downstairs and walk past the dining room on the first floor where the delegates are having dinner, quick and silent, hoping no one notices me. Past Marcus and Graylin’s door, even more quickly.
As far as my uncle knows, I agre
ed to his plan of saying no to the Silver Prince and dealing with the consequences for my mom, whatever they may be. Nahteran and I both did. But now that I’ve got a plan of my own, I don’t know that I could keep the pretense up if I faced Marcus again. So I continue on to the armory, and unlock it with the one key I slipped off the Innkeeper’s key ring before I gave it to Taya.
There’s one high, narrow window on the far side of the armory. It doesn’t let in much light, but the multitude of silver objects in the room catch it and refract it, amplifying it and turning it strange. The quiet seems thicker too. The door closing behind me shuts out the noise from the dining hall entirely, leaving me in silence and silver light. Haven light.
Overwhelming dread and guilt descends on me now. That I’m not doing enough, that I haven’t saved anyone. But I can’t let that slow me down right now. I need to find just the right objects with just the right magic in order to create the armor replica. I find that if I concentrate, if I empty my mind, I can get a glimpse—a whisper—of the magic trapped in each silver piece. It’s less than an image, barely a feeling. But it’s there, somehow. Wind. Ice. Fire.
Nahteran was the one who suggested we use soul-silver to deepen the deception. As soon as the Silver Prince put on our fake armor, he would sense the mundaneness of it. He’d know we tricked him, and make us pay for it. But if we used soul-silver, which emanated its own power …
We could defeat him by making the false armor into a weapon.
I start to gather objects from the shelves, trying to feel out the magic as I go. When my fingers brush the burnished sides of a silver tea kettle, it sings of flames and heat waves. I wrap it carefully in one of the T-shirts from my bag and tuck it inside, reaching up for more. It feels wrong. It is wrong. But it’s the way forward, for now.
An hour later, I meet Nahteran and Taya in the abandoned tunnel to the Turalian door. Marcus had it boarded up years ago, but it’s a simple matter to pry a couple of boards off, stack them to the side, and step through into the dusty blackness. The others follow behind me, each carrying their contributions to the project.
Nahteran’s backpack contains the phoenix flame armor, its pieces separated only by layers of fabric. Taya’s tote bag is filled up a third of the way with Willow’s special-occasion kitchenware—a glittering heap of gold and copper—gardening gloves, and a camping lantern that throws off enough bright white light to see by, but makes us all look like ghosts and intensifies the shadows at the edges of the light’s reach, making them shift and stretch like living things.
Nahteran lays the armor out on the ground—making sure to place each piece several feet apart from the others—and studies them intently. The Silver Prince has never actually seen the armor, so our reproduction doesn’t have to be perfect. But it should be close. Meanwhile, Taya watches me lay out the soul-silver in the shape of the phoenix flame armor, looking as conflicted as I feel.
“How do you know what each object does?” she asks in a soft voice.
“By touch.” I beckon her over, and when she kneels down beside me, I bring her hand to a simple silver bowl. I’m not sure if she’ll be able to feel the magic too. But I can tell from the widening of her eyes that she does.
“That’s wild,” Taya says. She steps back from the bowl and gives the tunnel a skeptical look. “Hey, are you sure this doorway’s sealed? Because the last time we were down here together with the Silver Prince, Havenfall was almost destroyed and I ended up on a one-way trip to Solaria. Now that I’m back, I’d kind of like to stay.”
“Sealed shut with magic so powerful, Marcus says we’ll never be able to open it again even if we wanted to,” I reply.
She wants to stay.
“Okay,” Nahteran calls out. “If you two are done reminiscing, I think we’re ready to start.”
Nahteran comes to stand beside us and looks down at my work. I’ve used ingots for the ribs of the breastplate, and arranged silverware in the shape of two gauntlets. I’ve also separated three small piles of silver objects off to the side.
“Fire, wind, and ice magic,” I tell them, pointing to the three piles. My voice is on the edge of trembling.
Nahteran and Taya are both silent for a long moment. Then she asks me, “How do you use them? How do we get the power out of the silver?”
“I’m not totally sure,” I admit.
I pick up a spoon—like the one Sura gave me, back when we were both prisoners of the soul traders in Haven’s antique shop—and turn it over in my hands, feeling the wind magic inside raising goose bumps, as if the faintest of breezes already emanates from the silver surface.
“Before, I just kind of … willed it to happen. The magic is already in there, it just needs to be let out.”
“Okay, good to know.” Taya’s voice is small, though, as she looks down at the silver.
“Let’s split up the magic,” I say. “I’ll melt the silver until it’s pliable with fire magic. Nahteran will use wind magic to shape it into the fake phoenix flame armor, and Taya will cool it with ice magic. Then we’ll put it together. I’m sure I can scrounge up some tools around the inn.”
We all agree not to do any test runs with the magic, knowing that once the magic is spent from an object, the bound soul seems to vanish from it as well. Even if using soul-silver is the only way to pull off this deceit, none of us want to use any more than necessary. We can’t mess this up.
Here goes … everything.
It only has to look good enough, I remind myself, anxiety brewing in the pit of my stomach, before passing the spoon to Nahteran and taking the bowl from Taya. I close my eyes and take a deep breath and call forth the fire.
It responds as if the Byrnisian magic bound to the bowl has been straining at its bonds, roiling just under the surface. A flame springs into existence between my hands, startling me so much I almost drop the bowl. It’s shaped like a candle flame, but larger and brighter, feeding on nothing, dancing in midair. I can feel the flow of magic, from the bowl to my fingers to the warmth of the flame, and it makes me dizzy and guilty and exhilarated all at once.
Setting the bowl in my lap so I keep contact with it, I lift up my hands, concentrating hard. Yet the flame seems like something alive, eager to do my will. It rises with my hands, and when I turn my hands downward toward the arrayed soul-silver, the flame eagerly kisses the glittering metal and turns it slowly from silver to red.
When the metal starts to go pink, rust-smelling wisps of smoke drifting from its surface, Nahteran is ready with his wind magic. A faint breeze floats around the room, scentless, unlike those coming from the Fiorden and Byrnisian doorways. But when Nahteran moves his hands, it concentrates, becoming a tiny funnel cloud that bears down on the slowly melting silver. It has the effect of a putty knife, smoothing the lumpy, glowing blob of metal out until it resembles a rib, resembles the real phoenix flame armor.
Then Taya hits it with a blast of ice wind, solidifying it again.
We all stop and let the magic die down, staring at what we’ve created. I’m out of breath, and my heart is beating fast. Looking at the others, I see it’s the same for them; Nahteran’s face is flushed and Taya’s chest is rising and falling rapidly.
“This is going to take for—ev—er,” Taya observes between pants.
“We can stay down here all night if we have to,” Nahteran says.
He’s out of breath too, the magic having taken its toll on all of us, but a strange intensity has come over his face. His eyes are bright, and there’s a spark in them, something I don’t think I’ve seen on his face since I found him in Winterkill. It looks like hope.
After we assembled the basic shapes of the armor imbued with Byrnisian fire, Fiorden poisoning, or similarly dangerous magic, we melted down the gold and coated the pieces in a thin layer.
Then Nahteran and I huddled close to the lantern and used the points of our daggers to recreate the phoenix flame armor’s intricate carvings as best we could; while Taya power drilled the tiniest of holes i
n the armor and strung it together with copper wire from the supply closet.
By the end of it, we were exhausted. We all had burns on our hands from the fire magic and cuts from getting too close to sharp edges in the imperfect light. All three of us were wilted and short-tempered and annoyed with each other.
But after the last snacks and midnight coffees were consumed, we all stepped back to stare at what we had created and realized—we have something. A decently good counterfeit of the phoenix flame armor. It won’t hold up to close inspection, but we don’t need it to. We just need the Silver Prince to put it on.
We pack everything up, being extra careful with the real armor, but moving fast. I’m desperate to get back up to my room and get a shower. My clothes are sticking to my skin with sweat, and if I’m lucky I might be able to get a couple of hours of sleep before I have to wake up for breakfast. I imagine Nahteran and Taya feel similarly.
But then a nagging thought sneaks through my sleep-deprived brain.
As Taya and Nahteran turn toward the stairs, I call out. “Wait! Now that we’ve got something to trade the Silver Prince for Mom, how is it all going to go down? I mean, once he figures out we betrayed him, I don’t think he’ll let Nahteran escape. And how will we get Mom back to Haven since we’re not bringing the real phoenix flame armor with us?”
“You’re right. That’s not going to work,” Nahteran says.
Taya bites her lip, thinking. “I know the Silver Prince’s bargain said you had to take armor into Oasis. But if we came up with some plausible reason for it, do you think he would come here instead?”
An unmistakable look of relief flashes over Nahteran’s face before he nods. “He wouldn’t be happy about it. But yeah, he would, if he thought he would get the armor. Still, though …” He squints at me. “Are you sure you want him here? In Haven?”
No. That’s almost the last thing I want. It makes my heart feel like it’s turned into a block of ice. But it’s better than the idea of Nahteran venturing into Oasis alone.
