The Mainland became a place only for specters and rulers.
They did not pretend any longer. Cleo abandoned all pretenses of working with Celeste and moved to her isle, breaking tradition. Oro uncharacteristically pushed their excursion back a few days, needing to deal with the wreckage and keep the nobles from rebelling. Tensions had never been so high.
They had always known that the Centennial had a timeline. A clock of a hundred days.
But it seemed as though that clock had changed.
“Tell me more about the heart,” Isla said on the fifty-third day.
A screech echoed through the night, so loudly the wood beneath her hands quivered. Isla took a steadying breath, keeping her grip, refusing the siren call in her head that dared her to look down at the hundred feet below her toes.
Oro paused for a moment, waiting for something. His gaze flicked to the sky. Then his arm reached up for the next branch. They wereclimbing up a lattice of wood, thick trunks that had been woven into webbing. Oro couldn’t fly wherever they were going, Isla assumed. She hadn’t asked why.
Isla had many questions. Which meant she had to be selective.
Another second passed without a response, and she was very close to pulling him off the grid by his foot. But he said, “It was made during the creation of the island and contains pure, concentrated energy from its creator.”
“Who created it?”
“Horus Rey.”
“And Cronan Malvere?”
Oro paused before his fingers could reach the next branch. She watched the muscles in his back tense. Slowly, very slowly, he looked down at her.
She stared back, eyebrows slightly raised. It seemed he didn’t have the energy to glare at her any longer. More than two dozen nobles had died at the ball, and each life lost weighed on him. She saw it in the firm set of his mouth, the tense shape of his shoulders. “Did Grim tell you that?” he finally said.
“He did. He’s much more forthcoming than other rulers of realm,” she said pointedly. Part of her wanted him to glare at her. Wanted him to do anything but look so hollow.
Oro still hadn’t reached for the next ring. She climbed up to his level so they were matched. “Is that all he told you?” he asked.
She nodded.
He frowned. “Not as forthcoming as you think, then,” he said. Then he climbed up to the next level.
“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked.
Oro said nothing.
“Hello?”
He turned to look down at her and said, “Ask Grim. He’s the mostforthcomingruler.”
Isla’s mouth was already open in response—when a hand reached through the lattice and pulled her through.
She was dragged forward, into an endless maze of wood. She couldn’t see her attacker; the moonlight was far behind her back. Isla reached for her dagger, which she had tucked into her waist, but another hand bound hers together. There was the unmistakable burn of rope against her wrists.
A moment later, she was on her knees in total darkness.
She was trapped again—but this time, it was on purpose. Isla had proposed using herself as bait. Oro had agreed, seeming willing to take more risks after the disaster of the ball.
And it had worked.
Light erupted, illuminating everything. The walls were honeycombed. She and Oro must have been climbing the outside of it.
Oro.
She saw the unmistakable curl of his cape as he stepped next to her. He wasn’t bound, he was simply standing there, looking down at her.
