“Thank you,” Enya said, and her eyes sparkled mischievously. “For showing us that our dear Oro does indeed still know how to smile.”
Enya had gathered a dozen volunteers. They all stood together on the Mainland, with supplies between them. She quickly explained the usage of the starstick, and the volunteers looked curious, but no one questioned it.
Isla drew her puddle of stars as big as she could, and they all barely fit inside. Then, they were in the Wildling newland.
One of the volunteers was immediately sick. “Sorry,” she said. “I should have warned you about the nausea.”
Isla had portaled them to Wren’s village. The tall Wildling stepped out into the street within minutes. At first, she looked alarmed, but slowly, her expression calmed. She dropped the hand that had instantly gone to her blade. Isla realized then that she hadn’t properly prepared her people for visitors.
“This is Oro, king of Lightlark,” Isla said. By then, a few Wildlings stood in the streets, watching the volunteers warily.
At once, they bowed their heads.
Isla introduced Enya, then Ciel and Avel, who rarely left her side, then the rest of the volunteers. Her people stared at them with varying levels of wariness.
The volunteers looked a little frightened too. The Skyling to her right was smiling, but her gaze kept darting to the monstrous hammer one of the Wildlings carried on her back.
Isla stepped between her people and the visitors. “We are here to help,” she said. “All of us.”
She worked with the volunteers to hand out supplies from the Mainland castle stock. They would need more for the rest of the newland, but this was a good start. Wren proposed the Wildlings be temporarily consolidated into a few key villages, so help could be centralized. A vote was conducted, and every person agreed to host their neighbors for the time being. Many Wildlings gave up their own homes to the volunteers for the week they planned to stay. Lightlark chefs began teaching Wildlings how to safely prepare meat.
“I’d like to do this for the Starling newland too,” Isla told Oro. “If Enya wouldn’t mind.” She had portaled there a few times, to check on them, in secret. They could use this just as much as the Wildlings.
Isla stayed up until the early morning speaking to her subjects, learning their names, their habits, their lives. She fell asleep on a bench in the middle of the modest village square to the lullaby of laughing, building, and sizzling cooking. Oro must have flown her to bed, because she woke up in her old room a few hours later and startled.
She gasped, tensed. She was back in this prison, this glass cage—
“Breathe, Isla.”
Oro was leaning against her doorframe, nearly filling it with his height. His golden hair was slightly damp from rain, like he had only just walked back inside. Something about the sight of him made her feel like she couldn’t breathe properly.
It felt criminal for someone to actually look good with limited sleep. Had he even slept at all?
She assumed he had just been at the village. “How are they?” she asked, her voice a little strained.
“Good. Enya has a new system for storing water and food and tracking who can wield.”
“Of course she does,” Isla said, not unkindly. She was in awe of the Sunling’s organization.
It was hot and humid in the Wildling newland, and Oro had placed her in bed wearing her clothing from the day before. She began to peel off layers, without really thinking, until she looked up, and found him watching her, eyes slightly wide.
Isla held his gaze as she slowly removed her long-sleeved shirt, leaving her in just the thin sleeveless fabric she wore beneath. It clung to her skin, outlining her every curve.
She could have sworn she felt the room get even warmer, as he lost hold of his Sunling abilities. His control slipped, for just a moment.
Oro stared at her, and she watched him swallow—
He was the one to look away. “Are you ready for training?” he asked the wall.
She sighed. Training was the last thing on her mind at that moment. She wanted him in her bed; it would be so easy to just let the world disappear for an hour—
“Isla?”
Her name on his lips made her burn even more, but she said, “Yes.”
“Good,” he said. “Today, we’re growing something.”
POISON
Oro made an orange rose sprout from his palm. He reached over and put it in Isla’s hair. “Your turn.”
Isla sat and stared at her own hand for several minutes, without any results.
They were sitting at the edge of a stream. The sound of water rushing over rocks was a balm rubbing against some quiet corner of her mind. The stream was framed by hill faces on either side, some parts jutting out more than others, creating a curved, somewhat narrow river, making it impossible to see exactly where it led. Thin waterfalls fell off some of the cliffs, sheer and frayed like curtains of hair.
Isla had always wondered what it might feel like to swim here but had always feared Terra and Poppy seeing her wet clothing or hair and not being able to explain it. Visiting the stream at night might have been an option—her guardians at least gave her privacy when she was supposed to be sleeping—but then she would have been at the mercy of a forest draped in darkness that she had learned the hard way had no mercy at all.
The woods had not hurt her when she walked through it this time. No, the nature had leaned down toward her, as if the trees had wished to whisper their secrets into her ears.
“Close your eyes,” Oro said. “Let your mind go still. Find nature in the world around you. Form a connection to it. Siphon that energy exactly where you want it. Think of the rose, blooming in your hand.”
She followed his directions, but her heart was beating too fast. Her lids fell closed far too easily. She wasn’t sleeping more than a handful of hours a night, and she was starting to feel it.
“Breathe, Isla,” Oro said.
She breathed and started the process again, focusing her thoughts. When her eyes opened, she found the smallest of flowers blooming in her palm.
Before she could smile, the rose shriveled up and died, as if poisoned.
She was the poison. For she was born not just with the power to give life . . . but also to take it away. “I cannot be Wildling without Nightshade,” she said, her voice brittle. “I will always be death. I will always be darkness.”
“You decide what you are, Isla,” Oro said. “No one else.”
It might have been a comforting thought, if Isla didn’t immediately think that she would only have herself to blame for her own mistakes, should she make them.
No one else.
Tears streamed down her cheeks, shocking her.
Oro was instantly inches away. “What is it?” he asked, fire already flaming in his palms, as if he was ready to reduce anything that made her upset to ash.
What was wrong? Why was she crying? All she knew was that now that it had started, she couldn’t stop. A sob scraped the back of her throat.
Oro always demanded the truth. She gave it to him.
“I . . . I don’t want to rule. I don’t want my life tied to thousands of others. I don’t want to have all this responsibility.” She shook her head. “And I know that makes me selfish and awful, and I have no right to be so upset, but I am. I want a life, Oro. Worse than all that is I don’t deserve any of this power. I am no one.”