She arrived in her room covered in blood. Lynx growled, and Grim was
there in a moment. She didn’t even look at him as she passed him by. She didn’t even tell him to leave as she stripped off her clothing in a pile and turned on the bath.
“Who?” he finally asked, the word as sharp as a shard of ice.
Her head rested against the side of the tub. She stared at the opposite wall and felt nothing. “Doesn’t matter. They’re all dead now.” Her words were emotionless. He didn’t have to know about their supposed prophecy, or the promised, or the other words that had driven them to madness. A
madness they had been willing to die for.
Grim portaled the crimson-soaked clothes away. She didn’t protest when he took the soap and gently helped her wash the blood from her temple, and back, and shoulders. She didn’t bristle when he began slowly washing it out of her hair.
She closed her eyes and wondered why death always seemed to follow
her.
“Change your mind yet?” Isla asked. Her voice was hard. Unfeeling.
The blacksmith didn’t falter. “Not for a moment.” He turned. “But I see that you did.”
Isla didn’t say a word as she held her wrists out in front of her. “I’m done pretending to be powerless,” she said. If she’d had her abilities, she would have been able to get away from the sect. She could have saved them.
“My dear,” he said, his gravelly voice like scraping rocks. “You’ve never been powerless a day in your life.”
With his touch, the bracelets fell onto the table.
“I’ll see you in a month,” he said. Then, he got back to work.
Isla thought to herself that he seemed remarkably busy for someone who was readying himself to die.
“Light reading?” She was thumbing through a tome that was as thick as her head and could be used as a solid shield, should she ever need it.
A tracking skyre wouldn’t help her find the ring, but perhaps another
type would. She had hoped to find some trace of them in the library, so she wouldn’t have to trust Aurora. She had gotten nowhere. The blacksmith and augur were right. It was a lost art.
Astria was standing in front of her, wearing her typical armor. She never took it off, and Isla wondered aloud if she slept in it too.
The general asked in an even tone, “What do you mean, sleep?”
Isla blinked, immediately taking herself out of the imaginary consideration for applying to be Grim’s general, when Astria leaned back, and said, “A joke.” She pulled what looked like a handful of nuts from her pocket and began eating them. “And the answer is: Yes, sometimes, when I’m too tired to change out of it.” Her eyes slid from the nuts in her palm to Isla’s book, curious.
Isla slammed it closed, emitting a formidable cloud of dust that immediately provoked the biggest sneeze of her life.
To her horror, when she opened her eyes she found a small pile of peonies in front of her, as if her hold on her abilities had momentarily slipped.
Astria stopped mid-chew, staring, her mouth agape. “Did you just . . . did you just sneeze flowers?”
Isla felt a flush of red creeping across her cheeks. “No.” “I saw you.”
The petals hadn’t come from her nose; that was ridiculous. Still, she
knew what it looked like. Isla ran her tongue along the front of her teeth. “If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you,” she informed the general. “I’ll go right for the gaps in your armor.”
Astria folded at the waist, laughing. She laughed and laughed, voice echoing up the tower, until a small man marched out from the stacks, hand in the air—already halfway to chastising—before seeing who he would be
speaking to. Then he abruptly turned on his heel and left. Astria continued to laugh until she reached up and dabbed at her eyes with a piece of cloth she kept in a pant pocket.
“Are you . . . crying?” Isla asked, incredulous.
Astria turned to her, and, with the same steady tone said, “If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you.”
Isla made a gesture signaling a truce.
Her cousin finally composed herself enough for Isla to break in. “So.
Did he send you here to find me?” She hadn’t seen Grim in a couple of days. The skies were swirling with color again, and he was preparing his people for another potential storm.
Astria gave her a sharp look. “I’m his general, not his clerk. Your wedding was a special circumstance.”
“Then why are you here?” The rest of the library was relatively empty. Astria narrowed her eyes at her. “I’m sorry, do I look like I don’t read?” Isla raised a shoulder. “Do you?”
“I do, thank you.”
Isla stared at her expectantly. When Astria continued loudly chewing on her nuts, Isla asked, “What do you read?”
A nut cracked between her teeth, and she picked away a curl of skin. “A little of everything, I suppose. Some history, here and there, though those
are usually horribly overwritten. Some mysteries. Romances too.”
“Romance?” Isla asked, her interest piqued. She and Aurora used to
trade books, but their selection had been limited. “There’s romance in this library?”
“Oh, yeah,” Astria said. “There’s a Starling writer from the last century whose works were smuggled in a few decades ago. Guess by who?” She smiled mischievously. “There are a few books by Nightshade writers as well, but many of them . . . well, many . . .” She made a face like she was vomiting.
“Many what?”
She snorted. “Many are about the ruler. Not by name, of course. But you can tell. The main characters are all tall, dark-haired, broody, powerful. It’s ridiculous how many women are in love with him.” She laughed, then stopped short, seeming to remember she was speaking to Grim’s wife. She cleared her throat. “Sorry.”
Isla didn’t care, though she would love to see the look on Grim’s face when he found out his library housed fantasies about him. She would likely wake up the next morning to the library aflame. She smiled at the thought of it.
Then her joy wilted. Lately, happiness seemed like flowers that withered before she could pluck them for herself.
She wished the book in front of her were a mystery or romance. Instead, she had been flipping through a multi-century look at how the curses had impacted society on Nightshade, hoping to find any mention of skyres. In summary: negatively.
Isla looked up at Astria, who had gone back to eating her nuts, and realized one of her greatest resources might have been right in front of her all along.
She wouldn’t ask her about the skyres; no, she couldn’t, not when her cousin was loyal to Grim. He couldn’t find out she was looking for something that would eat at her soul . . . but the augur had mentioned figuring out her history. When you learn the truth of who you are, your path will become clear.
Perhaps the answers she was looking for were somehow related to her parents.
“My father.”
Astria slowed her chewing. “What about him?”
What about him? She started with the little she knew. He was one of the few non-rulers in history born with a flair. “How did he discover he was
immune to curses?”
Astria rolled the shell of a nut between her fingers. A smile tugged at the side of her mouth, before melting back into a frown. “It was an accident. He fell asleep outside or something, and woke up to the stars. Realized the night didn’t kill him.”
“Was he interested in curses? Given he was immune to them?”
Astria nodded. “He would talk about the other realms’ curses for hours. He pitied the Starlings. And, of course, the Wildlings.” She looked pensive. “He envied Grim’s flair, though. Always wanted to travel. Always wondered what was beyond our borders.”
“Do you have a flair?”
She shook her head. “No. Just good at killing.” She grinned, then continued to chew her snack. “You know . . .” she said after a while, then trailed off, her voice cautious, as if she hadn’t yet decided whether to finish her sentence. Whatever interest she found in Isla’s face seemed to convince her, because she continued, “Your father. He liked maps.”
“Maps?”
She nodded. “You won’t find many here, in this library. Exploration was nearly impossible during the curses. Couldn’t really keep an entire crew
below deck in the middle of the sea all night, right? But your father . . . he searched them out. From before the curses. Collected them. Started making his own.”
“Why?”
Astria lifted a shoulder. “Who knows why he did anything he did? He
always wanted to leave. He was great in his role, but he hated it. Even I saw it, and I was far younger.” She was looking beyond Isla now, as if ensnared by a memory. “When your father was eight, he built a boat out of driftwood and tried to set sail at the castle cove.” She huffed. “The idiot didn’t realize how big the waves were; he really thought that he could make it. No one could come rescue him, because he did it in the middle of the night, thinking it was best chance of getting away. My poor aunt sobbed at the
window, watching him holding on to the boat for dear life, nearly drowning. The waves eventually washed him ashore. He was sent to training not long after.”
Isla swallowed, finding her throat dry. Her father had been desperate to see outside the world he had been born into. Just like her.
“Do you have any of them?” she asked quietly, trying to keep the emotion out of her voice.
“The maps?” Isla nodded.
“They should all still be in his room. It’s untouched. He lived in the castle once he became Grim’s general, but he only ever kept his most personal items in his own home.”
Isla nodded, lazily paging through the useless tome in front of her, waiting for Astria to leave. After a few more minutes of conversation, she did, and Isla wasted no time falling through her puddle of stars, into her family’s castle.
According to the Wildlings at the entrance, the main bedroom was on the top floor of the keep. Isla made her way up the stairs, speaking to a few of her people. They seemed more somber than usual; Terra and Poppy’s imprisonment hadn’t gone over well.
A few more women passed her on her way, and then she was alone, facing the last door in the hall, the only room on this side of the floor. Isla quickly realized why it had been left untouched.
The door didn’t have a handle.
It didn’t even have a keyhole. Isla frowned. How was she meant to get in? From the outside? She supposed she could break a window. Or simply break down this door with a weapon. Or portal in with her starstick.
She placed a hand against it to test its strength—and with the slightest touch of her fingers to the wood, the door creaked open.
Isla jumped back, almost expecting to find someone there.
But the room was empty. She hesitated on the threshold and the door opened wider, like a hand beckoning her inside.
Isla didn’t know if the room was enchanted or if it recognized her as her father’s blood, but it didn’t matter.
At first glance, the room was nothing special. It was empty save for a mirror, bed, and wardrobe. But as she stepped forward, shadows fell from the walls like brushed away cobwebs, revealing stacks of books. Letters. And, most of all, rows and rows of maps.
Astria had been right. Her father had been born with the heart of an explorer. An entire wall was made up of layers of parchment overlapping at the edges like a quilt and painted over with meticulously drawn coastlines. She recognized Nightshade, Lightlark, and the newlands.
There were a few other shapes she hadn’t seen on any other map.
Unexplored areas, by the look of it.
The largest of these was far beyond Nightshade, to the west. It was a large piece of land, separated from the rest of the map by a row of tiny islands, sitting like guards. Strange. How could something that large not
have been developed in all the years since the curses? It seemed special. In fact, it was the only uncharted body of land with a name, etched in with precision. Her breath caught as she read it.
No. That couldn’t be right. Its name was Isla.
