Isla sliced her blade through the air in a flash, right to her neck. The vine choking her was only an inch thick. A centimeter off, and she would slit her own throat.
But Isla’s swords were a part of her—without any powers to wield, she had focused solely on them her entire life.
The vine fell from around her neck.
She barreled toward Aurora, swords raised. The Starling ruler sent tree hulls through the glass, made spikes from bark, threw them in her path.
Isla cut them all down. She was fluid as water. Precise as lightning. Fast as a star hurtling to earth. Her swords moved independently, in tandem, in a rhythm like the blood pulsing through her veins, like the ringing through the glass dome, echoing the slicing and shattering as Aurora sent more of the woods inside.
As she neared, Isla felt the tears, hot on her cheeks. The greatest betrayal was not Grim’s. Not Terra and Poppy’s.
It was Celeste’s. She had pretended to be her friend. Hersister.
Isla had been alone. And Celeste had preyed upon her loneliness.
Still, even after everything, a treacherous corner of her heart still loved her friend.
Aurora grinned at the pain etched into the pockets of Isla’s face. “You could have done it,” she said. “Broken the curses. I hadn’t counted on Oro finding out about the heart. You two truly could have broken them, ifyouhad just been strong enough to let one of the rulersdie. And, of course, there is the matter of the original offense from the prophecy ...”
Isla whirled around, bracing against the impact of a trunk. She fell to the ground, air leaving her lungs for just a moment before returning, the healing liquid she had just taken still running through her blood, aiding her. One of Aurora’s thorn-covered vines sliced right down her side, sending blood streaming, and she screamed—but a moment later, the skin knitted itself together again.
Panting, Isla kept her pace toward Aurora, swords still drawn. “The original offense wasn’t using the heart,” Isla said through her teeth, grunting as she cut through a vine wrapped around her leg, thick as her limb. Another tried to take its place, to send her against the glass next to Oro and Grim—who were still fighting against their thorned constraints, bleeding in the process—but she cut that one down before it could get to her. “And it wasn’t a Sunling falling in love with a Wildling. Was it?”
No, curses so cruel could only be spun through a truly sinister act. The original offense could not have been love or wielding great power ... blood had to have been spilled to make something of a malice so great.
And not just any blood.
She had learned at a young age about the six rulers’ sacrifice in exchange for the prophecy that would break the curses. Poppy and Terra had told her that her own ancestor had led the sacrifice, giving her life up first.
But Isla now wondered if perhaps her ancestor hadn’t sacrificed herself at all.
Maybe she was dead before the other rulers had even learned about the curses.
The Starling’s eyes glimmered. As if, for a moment, she felt pain ... remembered the act that had changed her forever, that had been the basis for curses that had lasted five hundred years.
Her face shifted back to its wickedness a second later, and she raised her hands.
The ceiling shattered as a dozen trees crashed through it at once. Isla was showered in shards of glass. She screamed out, watching her skin break, then close, tear, then heal, the Wildling healing elixir fighting to keep up.
Trees pummeled into her, bringing her to her knees. Before they could crush her completely, Aurora twisted her fingers and wove their branches into a lattice around her.
Glass still rained down as Isla looked up at Aurora.
Through the gaps in her cage.
“Little bird,” Aurora said, shaking her head from across the room. “You should have stayed in the wild.”
But she wasn’t caged. Not really. Even when she had been locked away in her castle, she’d always had a portal to the outside.
She gripped her starstick from where she had again tucked it down her spine, ready to portal out of her cage—
And it flew from her hand, whipped away by a vine. She watched it roll across the room, to Grim’s feet. He looked up at her. Blood ran down his temples. He panted and winced, as if it hurt to breathe. But he managed to say, “Heart.” He gasped, his words barely coming out. “Yourheart,Hearteater.”
Her heart? She remembered the arrow that had gone through it, a shocking pain like a lightning bolt skewering her. She should have been dead. Even Wildling elixir, evenCleo,couldn’t fix an arrow to the heart.
Only a heart could.
Isla pressed a hand against her chest, and it burned—not from its injury, she now realized ...
