“I hear congratulations are in order.” Azul’s booming voice overtook the room. She hadn’t seen him since before the fight between Lightlark and Nightshade, when the Skylings had voted for their ruler not to participate.
So, he had heard about her marriage. “Who told you?” “Who do you think?”
“Zed.” The Skyling was fast as lightning. He hadn’t ever truly trusted her. Now, she knew he never would.
Azul nodded. “I heard the king is . . . inconsolable.” He studied her, as if waiting for her reaction. She showed none. If she thought too hard about Oro, and their life together, and the betrayal he must feel right now, she would start crying, and she didn’t know if she would ever stop.
Instead, she raised her head. Azul stared pointedly at her necklace. “What would you have had me do?”
“Well, to start, you could have not married him.”
Isla ground her teeth. “When I met him, I was a naïve puppet that had only ever known the confines of her room. Then . . . after the battle . . . it was the only thing to stop the killing. To stop the death. To stop
everything.”
He shook his head. “No, you knew what he was when you married him.
You knew how many people he had killed. You know now. Why stay? To stop a war? You are not a fool, Isla, so stop playing one. Do not think for a moment that Grim won’t invade again. Nothing in the world can come between him and his sights set, not even you.”
She hoped he was wrong.
“I stay because I’m a monster too, Azul.”
He gave her a look. “You are many things, Isla Crown, but you are not a monster.”
“You’re wrong. That is why I came here.” “To tell me I’m wrong?”
“No. To tell you the prophecy.”
Isla hadn’t told anyone. But someone needed to know. Someone needed to keep her accountable.
She needed to be careful with who she trusted; she knew that. But Azul was the most trustworthy person she had ever met. And, perhaps more than anyone, she trusted herself the least.
She told him every single word. Azul listened, frowning. “It is certain?” “According to the oracle, yes. One or the other.”
For a moment, it looked like he pitied her. Then, “So which one is it?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I really don’t. But either way, as it stands . . . either death would mean the end of thousands.”
Nexus bound all people to their rulers. It was a curse. “Why are you telling me this?”
She looked at the ground. Part of her felt shame. “I don’t trust myself.
I’ve made every decision with my heart . . . and it has ended in ruin. I wanted you to know the prophecy, in case I ever lost myself. In case you saw me about to make the wrong choice.”
He nodded.
“How are the Starlings?” She thought of Maren, who had told her about nexus in the first place. Cinder, her cousin, who was the most gifted Starling she had ever seen.
“Taken care of. Our newland has more than enough space for them.”
She supposed it helped that the realm was small, unfortunately, due to their previous curse. “They’re conducting a vote soon, I hear.”
Right. Isla had promised to make Starling a democracy and to yield her rule should they vote for another leader. It seemed obvious they would
choose one of their own.
She’d thought of Nightshade’s storms as a localized problem, but she now realized the portal could affect all the realms. Especially if the torn seam between worlds was growing.
“What do you know about storms?” she asked him.
Azul looked slightly amused. He studied her carefully. “What do you know about flowers?”
Fair. “How do you stop them?”
He seemed to consider this. “Storms are filled with energy. Powerful
Skylings can shape them, manipulate parts of them. Stopping them is more difficult. It would mean cutting them off at their source.”
There was no time for secrecy, not with Azul. “What if their source was a portal?”
Azul frowned. It was an unfamiliar expression on his face. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
“There’s a portal on Nightshade.” His eyes widened ever so slightly. “Not one that can be used. It’s a torn seam between worlds. Creatures are being let in. Storms. I need to find it and close it.”
There was a fold between Azul’s brows. His thumb was thrumming down the side of his chair. Silence.
“What is it?”
He hesitated for just a moment. Then, he said, “We read omens in the clouds.”
“And?”
His head lowered. His voice was nearly a whisper. “They warn of a storm to end all storms. A reckoning.”
She thought of the woman in the village, calling them a harbinger of the end. “When?”
He shook his head. “I’m not sure . . . But a storm is coming, Isla, I can feel it.” He dipped his chin as he said. “One unlike any we’ve ever seen
before.”
Chills swept up her arms.
“Wait here,” Azul said. He flew out of the room in a flash. When he returned, minutes later, he was holding a cage, with a bird inside. It was sky blue with a grey beak. Small enough to fit in her palm.
“This is a stormfinch. It can sense a storm before even Skylings can.” She had never heard of such a creature. “Before the next storm . . . It will start singing the most beautiful song you have ever heard.”
This would save countless lives, she thought. It would give Nightshades time to get underground before the tempests struck.
She gingerly took the cage. It was ornate, with swirling designs across its side.
“When she sings, I want you to get as high as you can. Then, I want you to hold this.” He slipped one of his largest rings off his fingers and handed it to her. It had a large light blue stone, like a bird’s egg.
At her questioning look, he said, “It has a shred of storm trapped
inside.” A shred of storm? She squinted, holding the stone up to her eye. Faintly, she could see something spinning within its depths. She gasped and stared at him.
He cracked a smile. “You didn’t think I wore all of these just for
decorative purposes, did you?” She studied all the stones he wore, on his fingers, around his neck, on the buttons of his cape. “They are all imbued with storms. They amplify my powers significantly. Precious stones can trap power.” He nodded at the ring in her hand. “Trap part of the storm in it, and the stone should lead you to its source.” To the portal.
“How?”
“Break the stone with power. The storm will be released and called to its origin. Follow it.”
Her grip on the bird’s cage tightened. “Thank you,” she told Azul.
Isla went to turn on her heel, but he called her name, and she just barely caught something he had thrown her.
Another ring. Her diamond ring. The one she had given to Azul before the battle for safekeeping. She looked inside. Something flurried.
“I added something to it. A shred of power for you to shape how you wish.” It seemed to hum against her hand, just like the other stone. She swallowed. She didn’t deserve this. If he had seen what she had done with power—
“Everyone can be redeemed. You are not a monster, Isla.” She wished she believed him.
“You are not,” he repeated. “I know one when I see one. I knew something was wrong with Aurora from the very beginning.”
Aurora.
Some empty corner of her mind ached. She had been her best friend.
She had been a stranger.
As she portaled away, she remembered the one thing she had left of her friend turned enemy. The only thing she had kept.
She had meant to go to Grim, to show him the stormstone, to hang the bird’s cage in the castle, but instead, she went to the Wildling newland. She went to the room she had been locked in, almost like the stormfinch.
A charred mark marred the center of her former room. The door had been ripped off its hinges. She had done that, in a fit of anger, proof that her bracelets were necessary. Now, even as she called for her power, it didn’t even whisper back.
Her wall of swords reflected her face in garish angles as she searched for the one object she had kept from the Starling newland.
Aurora’s feather.
She found it in a drawer. Upon closer inspection, it was just a simple
white feather. Its weight didn’t signal any importance. A single flame would kill it, a single gust of wind would spirit it into the forest. She had found
feathers just like it during her training.
So why had Aurora kept it in an orb? Why had she kept it a secret?
Isla strummed a finger down its spine, and the barbs shivered in waves, like a pond disturbed by a stone, a breeze humming through treetops.
Strange.
She thought of Azul’s words, how stones could be imbued with power.
Could feathers?
Her finger continued its path until its point, and she flinched, nearly dropping the feather in surprise. Its tip was as sharp as her dagger’s. A drop of blood dripped down her finger like a tear. The feather’s white point now gleamed red.
If it was this sharp . . . perhaps it was meant for writing, she thought, before finding a pot of ink and a ream of parchment in another drawer.
She wrote a single word. Isla. Nothing happened.
What did she expect would happen? She nearly snapped the feather in annoyance. She should burn it. She should throw it into the forest. It was useless, just like her former friendship.
Aurora had betrayed her, but she was dead.
If the prophet-follower was to be believed, she had another traitor to deal with.
