“Do it,” Isla said.
Oro looked at her. “You have a choice. You don’t have to—”
“I know,” she said. Then, again to Remlar she said, “Do it.”
Before Remlar could move an inch, Oro took a step toward the winged figure. “If you hurt her,” he said, voice lethally calm, “she will kill you. And then I will find a way to revive you so I can kill you again with my own bare hands.”
The threat made Isla’s own mouth go dry, but Remlar, who clearly had put a very low value on his life, just grinned wider. “I would expect nothing less,King,” he said. “But she has nothing to fear from me. She’s one of us.”
Us.
It was foolish, but something in her swelled at the word. When so many had rejected her, someone—even someone like Remlar—claiming her ... it felt good.
He walked over to her, clicking his tongue. His wings twitched as he studied her, mumbling to himself. His skin was the blue of a bird’s egg. His stride was feline, graceful, and his eyes were as sharp as his teeth.
His grin became wicked. “You might want to run,” he said casually to Oro. “Or, better yet, fly.”
Isla didn’t know if Oro heeded his warning. With one rapid motion, Remlar placed one hand against her forehead and another against her heart, and her vision exploded.
Pain tore her in two. Her scream was a guttural rasp; she could hear it even above the ringing in her ears. Tears swept down her cheeks.
She fell to her knees.
Her left hand struck the ground, and darkness erupted from her fingers. It ate through the nature in its path; everything living became cinder. Trees fell and disappeared; the air went gray with swimming shadows.
Her right hand landed, and from it a line of thousands of flowers billowed, rising from the ground in waves, blossoming in rapid succession. Roses, tulips, marigolds—they made a blanket across the forest, color streaming.
The world died and came to life in front of her, and she kept screaming until her voice disappeared in a final croak. It might have been seconds or minutes, but eventually, everything settled, and she stood.
One side of her was total desolation—the other the very definition of fertility.
Oro was in front of her in a moment. “Isla,” he was saying, but it was just a whisper at the end of a tunnel.
She took one step forward. Teetered.
“Look at me, love,” he said.
Love.She held on to the word like an anchor, but the thread between them slipped through her fingers—
Darkness won the war and swallowed her whole.
BEFORE
Isla took the steps two at a time—she really shouldn’t have come. How had she been so foolish?
Terra had always warned about Nightshades. They were the villains in all her stories. The monsters.
She really hadn’t meant to. She had meant to portal somewhere else entirely, but one thought, while her puddle formed—
Here she was, in the most dangerous place in the world. Running from a group of guards, around dark stone corners, in halls that echoed and closed around her in cavernous arches.
Isla turned into a narrow hallway and crashed to her knees. “Come on,” she growled, pressing her starstick firmly against the ground.
No puddle formed.
Isla didn’t want to wonder what would happen if she wasn’t able to travel home. Nightshade lands were thousands of miles away from the Wildling newland ... It would takemonthsto return by ship, and how would she even pay for passage? She didn’t have any jewels on her. Now that she thought about it, no one in their right mind would agree to take her anywhere, anyway.
If anyone figured out who she was ... she was dead.
