“I know what the sword does,” Isla told Oro. He immediately called a meeting.
Azul was not fighting with them, but he had remained on the island, to help in any way they needed him.
He was there, in the war room, when she told them everything. Her history with Grim. The oracle’s words. The fact that she had important memories. Azul looked pensive. Zed looked furious. Enya looked curious. Calder looked from Oro to Isla, then back again.
They might have been angrier if she hadn’t immediately told them about her latest memory.
“Dreks used to be people. Cronan made a sword that controls them and can make more.” She pressed her lips together. “I believe Grim now has that sword.”
Heat flooded the throne room.
“It’s done, then,” Zed said. “It’s—”
“Wait.” Azul held up a hand. “You don’t remember finding it, though, right? Perhaps you never did.”
It was a good point.
Zed laughed without humor. “The oracle said Grim has a weapon. The dreks flew toward Nightshade after the attack. It’s obvious he controls them. And now, with the sword . . . perhaps he has created more. We must prepare to face an army of endless dreks.”
Calder was the one who said what they must all have been thinking: “How do we possibly prepare for that?”
Even before learning about the sword’s use, winning seemed impossible.
Now, she wondered if it was foolish to ever think they could stand a chance against Grim.
“We’re dead,” Zed said, after a few moments of silence. “If he really has that sword, and can create dreks at will . . . we’re dead.”
Enya stood. “No. Not yet. What we are now is desperate. We need to find more power. We need to find another way to win.”
“We only have four days left, Enya,” Calder said.
She whipped around. “So, we give up? We let this army destroy our home? The one our own parents loved and protected?” She shook her head. “No. I refuse.” She took a step, and wings of flame burst forth from her back. They curled open, sizzling behind her. She looked like a phoenix. “I didn’t live five hundred years in the darkness, dreaming of the day I got to feel the sun on my skin again, to have my home taken away.”
Enya was right. They couldn’t give up.
And she was right about something else. They were desperate. Which meant Isla was about to make a very bad decision.
Grim was coming with an endless army of dreks. Loss felt almost certain, but she couldn’t give up.
There had to be a way to save the island. There had to be a way to save Oro and herself.
Isla used her starstick to portal to the edge of the Star Isle forest. It didn’t take long for the serpent to find her.
She watched as the snake turned into a woman and walked toward her, her long green scale dress trailing behind. “I let you live last time,” she said. “It seems you have rejected my gift.”
Isla didn’t have time for games. “We need you,” she said. “The destruction coming . . . We have no chance against it. Not without you and the other ancient creatures.”
The woman glared at her. “We are outcasts. No one has ever cared about us. How dare you ask for our help?”
Isla let her shadows loose. They swept across the silver ground, swirling like ink. “Because I’m an outcast too,” she said. She stepped forward. “I understand if you can’t trust anyone on this island. I understand what it’s like to be hated and abandoned.” She took another step. “Don’t trust them. Don’t believe in them. Believe in me.”
The serpent’s eyes sharpened.
“I will not abandon you. I will fight by your side, and when all of this is over, I will make you a place on Wild Isle. You won’t have to hide or kill innocent people for food. You will be part of the island again. I promise. I extend that promise to whatever else lives in this forest.”
She meant it. With every part of her, she meant it.
The serpent rejected her anyway.
Isla didn’t let the rejection stop her. There were other night creatures on the island. She went to each isle and sought them out.
Remlar was right. Most, when she showed them who and what she was, bowed their heads and joined her.
Her. Their loyalty was to her.
All this time, she had rejected the darkness within her. Now, she wondered if it was her greatest strength.
By the time she left the last isle, the shadows of the island tilted toward her, as if called by her presence.
She took one in her hands, felt it glide across her fingers. It slipped away, and she turned to grab it again—
But she wasn’t on Lightlark any longer.
BEFORE
Grim had made her an illusion of the cave. They had gotten past every single obstacle until the last—the dragon itself. Its tail now sat between them and the sword, too spiked to climb, and impossible to get through without power. If they couldn’t get past the dragon, they would have to lure it out.
They were thinking of ways to do that when Grim suddenly said, “I want to show you something.”
She took his hand, and they were off.
They landed in a field of flowers so beautiful, they looked like melted night. Deep purple, with five sharp petals. Stars.
Grim picked one and gave it to her. At first she was surprised, and touched, but he said, “Smell it, Hearteater.”
She did and frowned.
“Familiar?”
She would know the smell anywhere. “It has the same scent as the Wildling healing elixir,” she said warily. It smelled sweet. Syrupy.
“I think they’re the same flower.”
What? That didn’t make any sense. Isla turned around in a circle, eyes focused more closely around her. There was supposedly only a small, coveted patch of the flowers that produced the healing elixir in the Wildling newland. There were entire rolling hills of these here, a sea of nighttime sky. “What even is this?” She didn’t know the name of the flower that produced the serum.
“It’s nightbane.”
Nightbane. The drug he had talked about. The one that made people endlessly happy while killing them from the inside out. She felt like an idiot shaking her head so much, but none of this was adding up. She felt the need to spell it out clearly. “But the Wildling flower doesn’t kill . . . it heals.”
“We extract the same nectar. In Nightshade hands, under our own extraction process, it turns into a drug that produces euphoria,” Grim explained. “I suspect under a Wildling’s touch it turns into a healing elixir instead.”
She stared down at the flower Grim had given her. Her fingers ran across its petals. They were as soft as velvet and didn’t fold beneath her touch.
Both poison and remedy. Opposites, like her and Grim. The ruler of life and the ruler of shadows.
The flower connected them.
“We can make a deal,” Isla said quickly. “We—we don’t have much of this flower. If you can give us some of yours, we can provide healing elixirs.” Isla said it and wasn’t sure how to even make that happen. Terra and Poppy had no idea she had spent the last few months with Grim. It wasn’t as if she could tell them out of nowhere that they were making a trade agreement with Nightshade, but her people were dying and desperate. “In exchange, we need hearts,” she added. “From . . . from people you are already going to kill. And other stuff I can’t think of right now that we need.”
Grim stared down at her. The corner of his lips twitched in amusement. “It’s a deal, Hearteater,” he said. He held out his hand, and she took it. They shook on it. By the third shake, he had portaled them back to her room.
He didn’t drop her hand. She didn’t drop his.
Isla swallowed, and his gaze traveled down her throat. Lower. Lower. She took a step back, and her spine hit the wall. He stepped forward.
Grim had told her more about himself than ever, the last time she saw him. He’d let her look beneath the mask of death and darkness. Underneath . . . there was a man. Someone who had been through pain.