Isla might have promised she wouldn’t tell Grim about the heart. But she had said nothing about telling Celeste.
The first place she went once she reached the castle was her friend’s room.
She knocked, and the door swung open immediately, even though it was nearly dawn. The Starling must have been waiting all night to speak to her.
The pairings had complicated their plan.
She told her friend everything. To which Celeste demanded, “Are you sure he said heart?”
Isla nodded. “He must believe it fulfills the prophecy. An original offense committed again, somehow. Maybe finding it was the original offense?”
Celeste shook her head. “I don’t know. But I don’t like this. Not at all.” “Me neither. The king is clearly desperate to break the curses this time,”
she said. “But I think this can be good.”
Her friend looked at her as if she had sprouted a flower from her forehead.
“This is how we get into the Sun Isle library.”
Celeste considered that. “You think you can convince him to show it to you?”
Isla winced. The king hated her. Still, she would find a way. She nodded.
“All right,” the Starling said. “Get him to show you the library as soon as possible, then. There are just a few weeks until the ball.”
A few weeks until rulers are allowed to kill were the words she didn’t have to say.
On Isla’s way to the door, her friend called to her once more.
“Oh, and, Isla? Be careful.” Celeste bit her lip in worry. “The rulers . . . I’m afraid of what they’ll do to win, now that we know Lightlark is in trouble. I don’t trust any of them.” She looked her right in the eyes. “Especially not the king.”
Oro arrived at her room the next night, as promised. He barely spared her a look before leading her to their next destination.
This time, Isla didn’t ask where they were going. She had been to some of the isles now, knew where nearly all of them were. She could figure it out herself.
Twenty minutes into their walk, she was positive they were going to Sky Isle.
Crossing the bridge confirmed it.
Oro thought this was the first time she was seeing the isle. Isla didn’t go so far as to pretend she was in awe of the floating city, but she did keep quiet.
They left the base of the lower village and walked into a set of woods. Isla couldn’t help but swallow. She wondered if the forests on Lightlark were like the ones on Wildling. Dangerous. Deadly. Even fools feared the forest. No one went inside without protection. It was why Oro’s rash had been so surprising. Plants could be as wild as animals. They could strike, maim, kill. Terra said that was why powerful Wildlings were so important. Only they could tame nature. Protect others from it.
But Isla wasn’t a true Wildling ruler. Plants did not obey her. She had many scars that had taken years of elixirs to fade to prove it.
What would the king think if they struck her?
Would he blame the fact that she was supposedly cloaking her powers, at his request?
Would he become suspicious?
Luckily, when she entered the woods, nothing happened. The trees stood tall, like everything else on Sky Isle, like the people themselves. They bore sky-colored berries the size of buttons and wore dandelions up their branches, like they had gotten caught on bits of cloud. The temperature dropped quickly, and Isla wished for a cape, one of the ones big enough to wrap around herself. She thought of the king’s secret. It did get noticeably colder away from the endless hearths and fires on the Mainland.
Oro didn’t consult a map, but he walked assuredly, the island seeming to have a gravitational pull just for him. “I’ve identified two places on Lightlark that have an unusual number of the plants you indicated in the garden,” he finally said. “One here. One on the Mainland.”
The forest ground turned into a steep incline, and they climbed it in silence. The king could have flown, she knew. It would have saved a lot of time. There must be a reason he wasn’t. He had alluded to searching for the heart for over half a century. Perhaps he had flown over every inch of the island and had still been unsuccessful.
This time, it seemed he wanted to be thorough.
Finally, the hill crested, and Isla stared down into a valley full of purse plants. Relief was cool down her back. This variety of nature wasn’t dangerous. She would be relatively safe here.
But there was a new concern. There were thousands, taking up every inch below, from mountain to mountain. Miles and miles. Searching the entire area as carefully as they needed to, on foot, would take days. “How will we know we’ve found it?”
“You’ll know. The power it radiates is unmistakable. But only detectable from a very close distance.” So that was why he hadn’t abandoned her to fly the length of the valley in minutes.
Isla didn’t trust her ability to sense the heart solely from its power. Not when she didn’t have any of her own.
“Will it . . . look special?” she asked.
The corners of his lips turned down, their favorite placements. “Yes, Wildling,” he said. “It will look special.” He turned to the left without giving her a second glance. “I’ll start over there.”
Good. At least they wouldn’t be searching side by side.
She looked back into the valley and swallowed. There really was a lot of land to cover. It all looked the same too. It would be easy to mix up where she had and hadn’t looked, especially over days. She needed a strategy.
Isla found a pattern in the plants, rows that weren’t clear cut but were easy to spot once she knew their shape. Now, she just needed markers to indicate the areas she had already searched. Her eyes took in the land, looking for a color that stood out. A different sort of flower, maybe. A special type of vine.
But there was nothing. The plants all looked the same. Even the ones in the forest behind her were too similar in shade.
She was the only thing that stood out in the entire valley.
Isla sighed and reminded herself this was the best way to gain access to the Sun Isle library before ripping the bottom of her favorite shirt.
There. That would have to do.
She was efficient. After four hours, Isla had covered a good chunk of her area. She had developed a system. Purse plants opened when their tops were stroked. It took a few long moments for their leaves and vines to uncurl, and a couple of more seconds to get a good look inside before they closed again. At her fastest, she was able to get to five a minute. Once she was finished with a row, she marked it by tying a strip of fabric to its last plant.
By the time Oro came to collect her, Isla had looked inside over a thousand purse plants. And her shirt had been reduced to ribbons. Before, it had nearly reached her knees. Now, it ended far above her navel.
The king looked horrified. She grinned, reveling in the fact that she looked as wild as he believed her to be, covered in dirt, her hair curled around her face, clothes cut to pieces.
“What did you do?” he demanded.
She crossed her arms across her chest. “What I did was cover this entire area,” she said, motioning toward a large grove sectioned off by her fabric.
The king’s eyes briefly darted to the spot she had indicated. He didn’t look impressed.
He didn’t look anything.
Isla narrowed her gaze. “I’m assuming this means you didn’t find it?”
He didn’t humor her with a response before turning around toward the way they had come.
The next morning, Ella arrived with clothing. More long-sleeved shirts that looked just like the one she had torn to ribbons. Pants that were like her other pair—now coated in a layer of dirt—but thicker, with reinforced fabric on the knees, better for the elements. Boots that were far better suited to the task of searching forests and valleys than her now soiled-beyond-repair slippers.
“The king sent this,” the Starling said. Isla rolled her eyes.
She almost wanted to rebel and wear her same clothes from before, just to spite him. But she thought about her mission. Get him to show her the library. He wouldn’t honor her request yet. But perhaps if he saw her trying to help him, to find the heart . . .
Still. She decided she would wear her crown that night, as at least the faintest reminder that she was also a ruler of realm, not to be trifled with. Even if she had hidden most of it in the folds of her hair, so it wouldn’t give her away to the mysterious ancient creatures the king had warned her about.
Before they parted ways to search each half of the grove, Isla asked something she had been wondering since he had shared his plan with her: “How did you find out about the heart in the first place?”
He said nothing.
She casually walked the few feet between them, smiling sweetly. She reached up and flicked his crown, just because she knew he had hated it the first time. “You should tell me. Because if you don’t . . . I’m not opening another purse plant.”
Oro’s eyes flashed with irritation like crackling firewood. Still, he said nothing.
Isla clicked her tongue. “An untrusting king who always keeps all of his cards close to his chest . . .” Her hands circled her waist, fingers pooling in the oversize fabric of her new long-sleeved shirt. She stared pointedly at his arm, where the bluish gray had started spreading. The sign of the king’s impending death. “Tell me, how has that worked out for you?”
Oro glared down at her. He took a breath that seemed to shake his shoulders. Power emanated from him in thick waves—a sharp wind she couldn’t see, a riptide she couldn’t pull free from. Suddenly, the cool air went hot as Wildling.
The force of him made her knees wobble. But she couldn’t allow him the satisfaction of seeing that. Instead, she smiled again, blinked her long lashes, and lifted on her toes so she was just inches from his face as she said, “Well?”
Immediately, his power was ripped from between them, swallowed up. He did not flinch away from her proximity. “I’ll take my chances, Wildling,” he said coolly before flicking her own crown. The movement sent her back on her heels, stumbling a few steps. Her head immediately throbbed. How hard had he flicked it? She reached up to trace her finger along the metal and came upon a deep indentation.
Something in Oro’s eyes glinted with wicked pleasure as anger twisted her features.
“You dented it!”
He simply turned away and began walking toward his side of the valley. “Fix it!” she demanded.
All she saw was his back as he got farther and farther away, golden cape billowing softly in the wind.
“Wretch,” she whispered angrily under her breath. “If we weren’t paired, I really would gut you.”
That made him stop. He turned like he had heard every word.
She made a gesture at him that she hoped proved just how much she had meant them.
Oro frowned and turned back around.
And only because he was her best chance at getting into the Sun Isle library and finding the bondbreaker did she fix her hands in angry fists and walk toward her rows of flora.
They spent three more nights searching the purse plants. They worked from after the sun went down to an hour before it went up, enough time for the king to reach the castle before day reached him. Just as her room filled with light, Isla would collapse into bed, sometimes without even a bath, exhausted.
Her fingers were stiff, the muscles in her palms sore. Her arms even hurt after lifting them one after the other, thousands of times. Her neck ached from straining to peer into the centers of the plants. Her lower back was a lost cause.
Every day, Oro and Isla got closer in proximity, starting from the edges of the valley and making their way to the center.
By the thirty-first day of the Centennial, they met in the middle. Both covered in dirt. Both tired. Both frustrated, if the look they gave each other was any indication.
“It’s not here,” Isla finally said. Her voice was raw. Sleeping for a couple of hours during the day and working at night had begun to take its toll. Especially since she hadn’t started their search in good health in the first place. Her arm had fully healed, but the cold hadn’t completely left her chest.
The king wasn’t standing as straight as he normally did. He ran a hand through his hair, not seeming to care he was coating it in dirt. “No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
She must have groaned, because he looked down at her, eyes ablaze, almost daring her to make a snarky comment.
She might have. If she didn’t need him.
It took everything in her to take a deep breath and say, “Where is the second place?”
