Isla
But first, she needed the feather. And only Grim could give it to her.
“What—”
“Out,” he said to the attendants, the word a brutal command.
When they didn’t immediately scatter, he bellowed, “OUT!”
They moved toward the door, but apparently not fast enough. Grim portaled them away in a flash of smoke.
They were alone.
She turned in her chair to face him as he stalked right toward her.
“Why would I marry you?” he demanded, like the thought had been grating on him. His eyes were wide and creased. He hadn’t slept at all, it looked like.
His voice was so full of rage, so full of irritation, that she didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t help feeling insulted.
Grim rolled his eyes impatiently. “Nightshades don’t marry. And you’re . . . you’re a Wildling.” The way he said that word, spat out like an insult, didn’t make her feel any better.
He sighed, his fingers flexing, as if he knew he was failing at actually trying to get her to answer.
“Look,” he said, flatly. “You’re obviously attractive.
” She raised a brow at him. He gestured toward her in a harried movement.
“That’s not what I mean. I just—I need to know. Why would I marry . . . you?”
She had never seen him so worked up. He looked almost crazed. “You . . . loved me,” she said finally.
He shook his head, as if that was completely out of the question. “Did you have something I needed? Did you find me injured? Did you . . . poison me?”
Her mouth parted in indignation.
But his eyes filled with hope. “That’s it, isn’t it? You . . . you poisoned me.” Once the words sunk in, his expression clouded with rage.
“No. No, I—”
Her words were cut off when his shadows pinned her to the wall.
Her breath was knocked out of her, but she couldn’t help but notice that her head didn’t hit the stone on impact.
It was like his shadows cushioned her ever so slightly.
Was it subconscious? Was there a part of him buried deep down that still remembered her?
Her hope died when she took in his expression—unmovable, fixed in its fury. He was just like Cronan when he had latched onto a thought in her mind, digging in, cutting deeper, fixated on getting an answer. “Then what was it? Did you threaten me?”
What? What could she possibly have held over him? He seemed to agree, because he moved onto his next theory.
“Did you use an elixir?” She glared at him, shaking her head.
“Then what was it?” he demanded.
“I didn’t do anything.”
His shadows suddenly released her, and she collapsed into a heap on the ground. He loomed over her, and she worried this whole thing was pointless. He would never trust her, never believe her.
“I just—I just need to understand,” he said, his tone still sharp, but like he was trying his best to sound gentle. Which resulted in not sounding gentle at all.
Isla remembered what it was like to have gaps in her mind. She knew it must have been driving him mad. She had felt similarly when he was the one telling her they had an entire love story between them.
One he had made her forget.
At least, she remembered slowly, over time. Grim never would. But if she had any hope of him falling in love with her again, he had to believe that he had once. And he had to learn more about her.
“You—you know what it’s like to be trapped and alone,” she said, slowly, without moving from the ground.
“I know loneliness as much as you do,” she said. “My childhood was not so much an upbringing as it was a sharpening, of turning me into a weapon. I had spent my whole upbringing thinking I was powerless, weak. That I would disappoint my people.”
He nodded once, seeming to understand her. She knew he could understand, because it was so similar to his own story.
“I found a key out of my cage under my floorboards,” she said.
“A stick imbued with your own portaling power that you had given to your general. My . . . my father.” She watched as his eyes darted back and forth as if scanning his memory, processing this information.
“You . . . indirectly . . . gave me freedom. And that’s what led me to you.
” She swallowed. “I told you already how we met.”
“When you stabbed me,” he said, flatly.
She rolled her eyes but pushed on. “After that, you were using me. In order to get something you needed.”
Grim huffed. “Finally, a part of this story that sounds believable.”
She glared at him. “But then . . . you changed your mind. You chose me, and . . . and I suppose we kept choosing each other. Every day. Through every obstacle. Neither of us had pure intentions. It didn’t happen smoothly, or on purpose.
By the time we realized it . . .” She took a shaking breath.
She didn’t know if she was saying too much too soon.
She didn’t know if this was something he needed to uncover in pieces, the same way she had slowly regained her memories.
For a long while, Grim just stared at the floor, deep in thought. Then his eyes reached hers again. There was no recognition there. But there was a faint whisper of understanding.
“So it was the loneliness,” he finally said, straightening, as if the answer was that simple. “I was lonely, and you were there.”
She bristled. She had survived knife wounds that hurt less. “You should give yourself more credit,” she bit out, wanting to wipe the satisfaction from his face. He thought he’d figured it all out, but he was wrong. “Love is a choice, and you made it.”
His eyes flashed with anger. With a challenge. “And what choice will you make, Wildling?” he said.
She refused to look away, and neither did he. They were locked in a duel once more.
He was the first to drop her gaze, but there was no victory in it.
It was like he had grown tired of her. “It doesn’t matter now.
I have the answers I need.” He leaned down so that he could say the words right in her face.
“You might have meant something to me once . . . but you won’t again.
I would never care for someone as weak and foolish as you.
If you think there’s a chance at getting me on your side . . . don’t waste your breath.”
Then he rose to his full height, turned on his heel, and left.
The knights began escorting her to and from dinners after that. At the meals themselves, Grim didn’t even spare her a glance. And his indifference was worse than his hatred.
She missed him more than she could put into words, but even though they sat at the same table, he had never seemed farther from her.
She was starting to realize that she wouldn’t be able to convince him to hand over the feather.
Oro didn’t have that kind of time, and the thought of him defending their world alone .
. . The thought of failing him, again, when he had asked her for the starstick, for just one thing . . .
No. She wouldn’t fail him. She would take matters into her own hands and steal the damned feather herself.
It was easy to stay silent during the dinners.
To eat, and listen to the conversation, in case anything would help her situation.
Nothing did. Cronan, she learned, only liked to talk about the planets he had conquered, the worlds he had brought to ashes, and his plans for all the power he would gain from his upcoming invasion of their world . . . and the galaxy beyond it.
The new people in the castle were a sign of celebration. After the dinners, there were parties, though she was never invited. Still, sometimes she could hear them, up above.
Celebrating every day her planet inched toward ruin.
The knights kept her under close watch. There wasn’t ever an opportunity to slip away. Isla studied their movements, noticing that there was no key for her to steal. It seemed like the cell door locked by their touch alone—and Grim’s.
Was it enchanted to respond to their blood? That would certainly make escaping harder.
Cronan always ordered the knights to take her back to the dungeons before the meal was finished. That would be the perfect window of opportunity to slip away. Grim wouldn’t be in his room. All the other heads of planets would be confined to one place.
But to overpower one of the knights, she would need a weapon, and she had none.
Not even that knife she’d tried to take from the dinner table—thanks to Grim.
She still had her armor, but now, it was miniature, each plate far too small to cut deeply.
Without her powers, she couldn’t transform the metal.
She went through countless options in her head, even looking in the room where she was bathed and dressed every day.
But there was nothing sharp. Nothing at all.
That evening, when she was thrown into the cell, she looked over at Lark, and an idea formed in her head. One her ancestor was certainly not going to like.
“How badly do you want that feather?”