by Sara Holland
“I’m still not following, Maddie,” Dad says, sounding puzzled over the faint tinny buzz of our bad connection. “I’ll come to your uncle’s place if you want me to so badly. I can be there tomorrow, but why now? And why do you sound so happy?”
“I can’t tell you on the phone, Dad.”
It’s too big. Too much.
I let out a laugh of pure exhilaration and hope into the starry twilight. Maybe there’s magic in the rest of the world after all. A breeze picks up, lifting my hair, carrying the scents of pine and flowers and running water.
“Let me show you,” I tell him. “Come to Havenfall. You have to see it for yourself.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
What a wild and strange journey it’s been! Writing and launching Phoenix Flame through seemingly endless global upheaval was a challenge unlike any I’ve ever faced, and I couldn’t have done it without the most awesome publishing team an author could ask for.
Thank you to the whole team at Bloomsbury on both sides of the pond, including Cindy Loh, Claire Stetzer, Diane Aronson, Erica Barmash, Faye Bi, Phoebe Dyer, Beth Eller, Courtney Griffin, Mattea Barnes, Naomi Berwin, and everyone else who has had a hand in bringing Phoenix Flame to the world! I will forever be thankful for your talent, hard work, and enthusiasm. Thank you for loving Maddie, Brekken, Taya, and Nahteran as fiercely as I do.
Thank you to designer Sarah Baldwin and artist Peter Strain for creating the absolutely stunning, gorgeous, showstopping covers of Havenfall and Phoenix Flame. There aren’t enough adjectives in the world to do your beautiful art justice.
Thank you to Lexa Hillyer, Lauren Oliver, Lynley Bird, Stephen Barbara, Lyndsey Blessing, Pete Knapp, and everyone else at Glasstown, InkWell, and Park & Fine—I am blessed to have so many brilliant and indefatigable minds on my team! And thank you, too, to Deeba Zargarpur, Alexa Wejko, and Emily Berge—I’m so lucky and proud to count you among my friends.
The best thing about working with books for a living is all the wonderful people I’ve met along the way. Thank you so much to Elizabeth, Katherine, Jazmia, Patrice, Laura, Arvin, Mark, and all my other friends and colleagues in this wide world of publishing—you make it all worth it.
Thank you to Celine, Liz, Ronnie, Quinta, Emily, Lindsey, and Brent for being lifelines during the great lockdown of 2020 and always. I am so grateful for you. And I know I probably owe you a text.
Thank you to my family for always being my solid rock, no matter what the world might throw our way. Love always!
Read on for a bonus chapter from Nahteran’s perspective!
The landscape looked so peaceful. That’s what struck Nahteran as Wyoming scrolled by outside the window, Taya in the driver’s seat next to him, the mountains a distant presence to their west. Byrn had plains too, but they were the opposite of peaceful, the ground charred and split with the scars of lightning, the sky constantly roiling with fire-laden clouds. Nothing like this, the rolling, scrubby fields interspersed here and there with scrappy trees or clumps of bushes, cows or horses grazing behind wire fences, stretching as far as he could see beneath a lacquered blue autumn sky.
But it seemed wrong somehow, that quiet. He didn’t feel peaceful. Anxiety thrummed beneath his skin. He was frightened of where they were going, yet at the same time he felt like there were invisible threads tied to his bones, tugging him forward.
For a few months now, he and everyone else at Havenfall had been tracking down the soul-silver, and one by one, freeing the Solarians bound inside. It was an enormous project, and sometimes Nahteran had to push away his frustration at the slow, careful nature of it. It was a multistep process of finding a trader, learning everything there was to know about them, and only then making a move to recapture the soul-silver.
There were moments when Nahteran edged uncomfortably close to nostalgia for his time in Byrn, a servant to the Silver Prince. When the Prince wanted something, he wasn’t furtive about it. Thunder and lightning would shake the city. People would fall over themselves to bring him what he wanted. Even though Nahteran hated and feared him, being in close proximity to that power was like touching his finger to a live wire and feeling the electricity shoot through. Painful but exhilarating at the same time. Not this slow, careful, gradual work.
He knew if he brought this up to Taya, she would remind him of everything they had accomplished already. The Solarians back at the inn that they had freed from the soul-silver. Some were still healing up in the infirmary, some opted to return to Solaria, some decided to join with Havenfall and were going out on their own missions. Some had been trapped in the silver so long they didn’t even understand English. These Graylin took in and tried to figure out a way to communicate through some new, shared language.
As Havenfall’s resident Solarians, Nahteran and Taya were the ones responsible for actually freeing the souls from their spellbound prisons. Nahteran still couldn’t quite explain what it was they were doing. When he held one of the silver objects in his hands, it wasn’t like he could articulate anything about the soul inside. Yet sometimes it was like he could feel a pull, some invisible tether tugging him toward another silver object. When the two pieces were close enough, something happened—a rush of energy, a blinding white light, and then there was a person where there wasn’t one before.
A soul, put back together.
But the soul-silver trade had split many Solarians into more than two pieces. Bringing two together would cause the person’s body to reappear, but that didn’t mean they were whole again. For that to happen, to bring them fully back to themselves, someone had to track down and hunt and bring back each splinter of soul, wherever it was in all the worlds.
Sometimes—often, though it hurt to think about—they couldn’t find all the pieces at all. The Solarian would never be whole.
Would that be his own fate? Walking around for the rest of his life with a missing piece, a hollow place, an emptiness that would never go away?
It didn’t have to be, he told himself. Not if he and Taya succeeded today.
As if she had heard her name in his thoughts, she glanced over at him from the driver’s seat. “Don’t look so worried,” she said with a light smile. “You’ll jinx us.”
Nahteran tried to return the smile but it felt forced, and Taya had already turned her gaze back to the road. Around them, only occasional vehicles trundled by: truckers and pickups and minivans. “Of course,” he said, trying to keep his voice similarly light. “Nothing to worry about. Not like we’re trying to stake out an infamous silver trader or anything.”
Sarcasm was not employed in the Silver Prince’s court. It was a new skill to Nahteran. But he was learning. Between Taya and Maddie, he had plenty of material.
“Anyway, I’m taking it as a compliment,” Taya said. “It means Marcus finally trusts us to do important stuff.”
“Or we’re just the next best option since Maddie and Brekken are in Fiordenkill.” Marcus had been kind and welcoming to Taya and Nahteran, but there was a trace of wariness in how he had kept them so far from many missions outside Havenfall. Taya wasn’t part of Marcus’s family, and Nahteran was still regaining everyone’s trust after abetting the Prince in his effort to get Mom back. For a few weeks after the Silver Prince’s attack, Marcus had kept them relegated to the inn. Now, though, as they tracked down more and more leads, more silver traders, he and Taya had been called into the fray. And thank God. Lately, Nahteran felt like there was an electric current running beneath the surface of his skin. Like if he couldn’t be in motion, couldn’t take action, it would burn him up from the inside.
Taya shrugged. “Then I guess we better kick ass.”
Nahteran swallowed. He looked at her phone, fastened to the dashboard with a stand improvised from duct tape. The cracked glass screen showed a grainy sprawl of fields and straight roads—the landscape around them now—but up ahead, they’d go west into the mountains, where a red star blinked. Their destination.
About a month ago, the name had s
tarted tripping out of traders’ mouths, helped along by the Heiress’s truth serum. Janna Reynolds. It sounded so ordinary, so unremarkable, except for the way the traders said it. With a mix of jealousy and fear. She was a new trader to the scene, and a different kind than Whit and the others—locals who had heard the rumors about magic at Havenfall and decided to capitalize on it, working with unscrupulous delegates from Fiordenkill and Byrn to smuggle soul-silver from those worlds into this one.
No, Reynolds had money. Last week, they’d captured the trader Whit—the one who almost killed Maddie—and brought him to Havenfall, and he told them all about her. Hundreds of pieces of soul-silver lost from Havenfall over the years had ended up in her possession, even though she had never been to Havenfall herself, even though she was human. She had the magic of money, which Nahteran was learning was just as potent as Byrnisian fire. She bought soul-silver from the traders slinking around Havenfall and then sold the pieces at marked-up prices to buyers around the country. She did deals only once or twice a year, but when she did, powerful people flew in from all over the world. How much did she know about the nature of the magic? Nahteran wondered. Did she know that every bit of stolen magic was bought with a living soul?
And one of them his.
That’s what he hadn’t told Taya, hadn’t told anyone. That going through the records, he’d become familiar enough with the trader’s notations to start to see patterns. It was a strange thing reading about the splitting up of your own soul into a dozen strands, then used to bind magic to silver. The neat bloodlessness of it all. Ten pieces to the Silver Prince. One piece gone unaccounted for, which Nahteran figured had to be the jack necklace that Maddie wore. And one last piece sold to Janna Reynolds among hundreds of other objects over the years. A silver bangle, binding—appropriately enough—Byrnisian fire magic.
And now they were headed Reynolds’s way.
What would it feel like to be whole again?
The opposite of Havenfall, the Reynolds mansion was a low, boxy creation of stone and glass, a jutting presence on the mountainside. They could just make it out from down below on the road. The trees had been cleared away around the house, leaving a ring of violently green, militaristically trimmed grass. The narrow road off the highway where they turned ended in a dead end: a gate, closed and locked by an electric padlock.
Taya parked the car to the side of the road, and they began the arduous journey up the mountainside on foot, under the cover of trees, staying as silent as they could. Taya held out her cell phone, transmitting their location back to Marcus so he would know where to go with Sal and the others tomorrow. It was slow going, and Nahteran was acutely aware of her faraway expression as she glanced around at the trees. How much easier would it be if she could assume her animal form, with its long stride and padded paws?
But he wouldn’t be able to keep up. He had never been able to change his shape at will, like Taya and some of the other Solarians could. The best he could manage was getting some scales to rise along his arms and cheekbones, replicating the Byrnisian appearance that he had worn for so many years of his life.
“When you were in Solaria,” he asked, “were animal shapes grouped by family?” The real question underneath hung in his mind, a haunting echo. If I could access my animal form, would it look like yours?
He kept his voice low so it didn’t carry, but he could tell from the slight shift in the set of Taya’s shoulders that she had heard him and was thinking about her answer. Strange how little some things could change over the years. He had a hard time thinking of her as his sister; he didn’t remember their early years together as well as she did. He knew this was painful to her, but there was nothing he could do about it. But then occasionally there were moments like these when he had a flash of feeling like he was looking in a mirror.
“Not necessarily,” she said, and with his brain spinning in double-time anxiety the closer they got to the mansion, it took him a moment to realize she was responding to his question about animal forms. “Not that I saw. It has more to do with you as an individual. You can’t guess what someone’s shape will be until it comes upon them.”
And what if it never does, he wanted to ask, but let it drop. Maybe once they found the bangle and restored the last piece of his soul, he would find out. Maybe it was just that one missing piece, that one empty space, and then it would be there—his true form, his Solarian form.
Maybe those moments would go away. Moments when he felt a yawning gulf of anger and emptiness threatening to swallow his heart.
The trees around them were alive with sound—birdsong, the wind whispering through branches, all the small forest noises Nahteran was used to by now. Yet, the closer they got to the Reynolds mansion—glimpses of blinding glass occasionally flashing through the trees—the more these subsided. In their place, Nahteran could hear the hum of a generator somewhere. One of the traders, interrogated with truth serum, had said that Reynolds operated off the grid—like Havenfall, keeping her place of business secret from the rest of the world. But where the point of Havenfall’s secrecy was protection, hers was profit.
There was something else too that was strange, disconcerting. Something else floating toward them.
Music. Classical music, to be exact. It was distant, tinny. Clearly played out of a speaker. But there was a discordant, repetitive note woven through it. A screech—
“An alarm,” Taya muttered.
Cold seeped through Nahteran’s body. Had they been seen? He stepped closer to Taya, his muscles tensing and his limbs automatically going into a fighting stance. Taya stared intently at the bank of trees, head cocked and mouth flattened into a tight line.
But there was no other sound. Nothing approaching. Nahteran wasn’t sure how long they stood there—thirty seconds, a minute, two—but the sound stayed constant: the ornate, fussy music shot through with the insistent squawk of the alarm.
Eventually, Taya took a step forward, and Nahteran followed, his blood rushing in his ears. They got to the edge of the trees and looked out over the unnatural, golf-course-like lawn. Immediately something presented itself as wrong: the number of cars on the gleaming, circular black driveway. There were several, and they were not the sleek things that Nahteran had expected based on the rest of the place. Parked on the asphalt were rugged black SUVs and one motorcycle—not like Taya’s but a huge, hulking one, seemingly meant to intimidate. It didn’t square with what the traders had said about Janna Reynolds: a cold, ruthless woman who liked to use her money and power to collect beautiful things.
That, and the front door was open. Standing half open, unattended, giving way to a glimpse of an immaculate living space, all stone and glass.
“Maybe she’s with buyers,” Taya said.
“She’s not supposed to be, not today.” The thought made sweat start to prickle his hands. He had run over everything in his head a thousand times. Under the influence of truth serum, the trader they had in custody at Havenfall had told them about a deal that was supposed to go down later this week—Reynolds planned to sell hundreds of soul-silver objects for somewhere north of a million dollars. Before that could happen, Marcus, Sal, and volunteers from Havenfall would break in and capture Janna Reynolds and reclaim her vault of silver. But whatever she’d already sold was most likely lost to them. Whit had said that Reynolds didn’t keep records of her buyers. With her, enough money bought you total anonymity. If this deal went down before Marcus and the others arrived to stop it, the Solarian souls trapped in the objects could be lost forever.
Including Nahteran’s.
“Shouldn’t there be guards?” Taya whispered, her dark eyes scanning continually over the mansion and lawn. “It feels like there should be guards. Security of some kind.”
Dread seized Nahteran’s heart, and before he could think better of it, he stepped out of the cover of the trees onto the grass. The warmth of the sun fell over his face, but it couldn’t calm his raging heart, a drumbeat only he could hear.
But nothing happened. Nothing changed. Here, though, he could tell that the alarm and the music were coming from the house. Something inside him tugged him closer, like he was a puppet on a string. He walked toward the front door.
“Nahteran!” Taya scrambled to catch up with him, caught his arm. “We shouldn’t do this.”
He didn’t want to tell her about the bangle, the fragment of his own soul that might be inside this house, might be being bargained over right now. It felt selfish to focus on that when so many souls were at stake; selfish to fixate on it when he was functioning well enough with eleven out of twelve pieces back in place.
But he didn’t feel like himself, even if he wasn’t entirely sure who his self was. His life was better than it had been in years—the Silver Prince was dead, and he was safe at Havenfall, with all the people he cared about around him. Maddie, Marcus, Graylin, Taya, Dad, Mom. And they were making real progress against the soul traders, freeing Solarians from their silver prisons every day. But nightmares still plagued his sleep. Dark feelings courted his mind: anger at Mom because she hadn’t saved him from the kidnappers all those years ago. A sick yearning for a taste of the power he’d had at the Prince’s side in Byrn. A dread that he was eternally trapped between worlds, not really Solarian and not fully human. People weren’t supposed to feel things like this. There had to be something wrong with him, something broken that regaining this last piece of his soul would fix.
“If the buyers are here, we can’t let them get away,” he hissed to Taya. “We’ll never track down the objects if they do. We have to stop them.”
Taya’s jaw was set, her eyes burning. He could tell she didn’t disagree. Still, she said, “There’s only two of us. And—”she gestured toward the collection of vehicles on the driveway—“a lot more of them.”
