Chapter 19
CORIN NOTICED brIAR’S dress was stained with blood when she crawled out of the debris. The earthquake had wrecked the cottage, the broken wood and shattered stones scattered in soil. The roof had collapsed inside the walls, breaking supporting beams and plastic furniture. Briar lay among the wreckage, her limbs strewn over the rocks, while the butterflies that once adorned her cape fluttered from her body and scattered in the air. She was too still. Corin jolted forward to reach her until pain spread to the side of her stomach.
She looked down to see thick splinters wedged in flesh. A patch of blood bloomed on her shirt. The pain turned clearer as the memory came back to her: the fox figurine shattering, the argument, the desire to attack Briar for bringing up Elly, because how dare she, when she knew Corin didn’t want to think about their last fight?
Then there was Elly’s face again, wide-eyed and frantic as she ran through the wreckage and yelled Corin’s name. She might have asked what happened, but Corin couldn’t remember, not when she gripped onto Elly so tightly as if she would vanish otherwise and asked, “Do you wish you had a different sister?”
It came as a frenzied string of words. Elly took a moment to register the question. “What?”
“If I wasn’t born, or someone else had taken my place—did you ever wish for that?”
The pain blooming on the side of her stomach had reached her chest, clenching the organ like a fist. She felt too raw, and perhaps that had been Briar’s fault, their conversation re-surfacing the fears she tried to hide: that maybe Elly would be happier if she had been stuck with another person, someone who wasn’t so resentful and bitter and cruel. Maybe the world would have been a little less miserable if it had been anyone else who took care of her.
“You definitely hit your head,” Elly said, “because you’re not making any sense.”
She pulled Corin out of the debris with no sign of resentment, just concern. The bare simplicity of it relieved Corin, if only for now.
The air shifted with magic as stones scattered from a gust of wind and Malicine rushed to Briar’s side, shouting her name. Penny and Dime helped roll the princess over to her back. A fallen beam had opened a gash in her skull. Corin expected blood, yet a strange patch of moss grew from the wound instead, trickling leaves down her temple, running vines that were supposed to be her veins. She bled flowers and greenery, her skin soft and thin like tissue paper wrapped around a bouquet. Tiny petals bloomed as her lashes fluttered open, as if she were waking up from peaceful rest.
“You’re all right,” Malicine sighed, placing a glowing hand over Amelia’s wound. The moss shrunk as Briar’s skin pieced itself back together. Aside from the gash on her head, the rest of her body remained a clean slate. She hardly looked injured, which should have been impossible. They had stood so close together, yet only Corin bore the brunt of the collapsed cottage. As if she were the target all along.
Malicine turned to Corin and snarled, “What did you do?”
“Nothing,” she replied through gritted teeth. She tried pulling the splinter from her side, but it only made the pain worse. Malicine gestured to her wound, and Corin felt the warmth of their magic, the slow release of the wooden fixture from her flesh. The splinter broke apart, and Corin’s stomach pieced itself back together along with her other scratches.
“So you’re telling me a natural disaster happened in a world where nothing here is natural,” Malicine said. “You were alone with Briar when the cottage broke down. You must have had something to do with it.”
“It’s okay, Mal,” Briar said. “No one was badly hurt.”
Her placating tone irritated Corin, the inflection too similar to her behavior inside the cottage when she feigned being carefree. It didn’t matter how often she played coy. Corin would remember how Briar’s face had gone pale, like a bare moon unveiled in the night. The princess was hiding something. If she could choose to live in an imaginary house filled with greenery and stone, she could also choose to have the house of her dreams break down by her own will.
“You did this,” Corin snapped. “You couldn’t handle me interrogating your past, so you almost killed me. You’d do anything to avoid confronting the truth. Is that why you’re hiding the treasure?”
“That’s enough.” Malicine’s voice was cold, sharp. “You dare—”
“No. Corin is right.”
Everyone turned to Briar in surprise. The animals clung to their petticoats and quieted down, as if evaluating if they would continue playing pretend.
“I abandoned Gyldan when there was no royal heir to look after the kingdom. It was my negligence that caused your suffering.” Briar pressed her hands flat over her dress, calming the butterflies that swarmed her. She took a deep breath, then looked at Corin in newfound resolution. “So I’ve decided that I will help you find your treasure. But it will not go to Ezran. It will stay with you.”
Corin didn’t know if she heard the last part correctly until the animals gasped. Malicine only blinked, though a knot formed between their brows. Even Elly was surprised, as she asked, “Why?”
Briar’s gaze softened. She raised a gentle hand and cupped Elly’s cheek.
“Because you two have lost enough.”
The words struck Corin. The sorrow seeping through. The truth in it. That was how she knew Briar meant her promise. She should have been relieved to see the princess making amends, yet her skin prickled with a wariness that refused to leave her body. She wondered how Briar could give up the treasure so easily. Perhaps the princess didn’t care for gold. Or perhaps she thought the certainty of being alone was better than risking any chance of loss at all.
“While it’s admirable that you suddenly want to do charity work, that doesn’t solve the issue of your godmothers making another portal,” Malicine said.
“We have time,” Briar replied. “It will be another hundred years before they can open another one.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I figured out how they did it.”
The breeze scattered daisies across the debris. Briar plucked one of the petals that fell from her hair and pressed it between her fingers, crumpled and graying instead of white.
“When I fell asleep, I had just turned eighteen, exactly the time when the moonflowers would bloom. I wore them when you opened the portal, remember? That’s why my godmothers couldn’t follow Corin and Elly, even though they replicated the spell. Moonflowers die as quickly as they bloom. There is a limited window for people to cross over, and it only opens every hundred years.”
Malicine crossed their arms. “That’s a long commitment. You suppose they will grow tired and simply give up?”
“No. Ezran is loyal. He will keep trying, no matter the cost.”
Her words seemed to have weighed on Malicine. Their shoulders sagged as they stepped carefully through the ruins, dragging their staff around the debris. They gestured to broken planks and pieced the walls together. The animals joined to help, the raven collecting plastic trinkets from the rubble, while Penny and Dime gathered stones in heaping piles. Eventually, Malicine enchanted one of the wicker chairs on the porch to stand upright and took a seat, hands clasped together.
“I think this goes beyond moonflowers. We left something else behind, too. Your book. That’s how your godmothers learned to open portals in the first place. They put together the pages and went through the rubble for other relics. We should’ve been more careful instead of acting recklessly.”
“I know,” Briar agreed.
“So let’s wake up and try it again.”
Corin noticed the shift in Briar immediately, a flicker of fear in her eyes. Before the princess opened her lips to protest, Malicine put up their hand.
“I don’t mean right now. In the chance Ezran opens a portal and disrupts the dreamworld, I’ll use my amulet to wake you up. You’ll look for me again in the physical world. Then we’ll start over by escaping to a new dream.”
A dull ache throbbed at the side of Corin’s head from listening to the conversation. “Wait,” she interrupted. “How is it possible that she could wake up after hundreds of years?”
Malicine tossed Corin an impatient look, as if they were speaking a very simple concept that Corin was too idiotic to understand.
“Time is linear in the physical world, but it doesn’t exist in the dreamworld. Here, there is no past, present, or future. That means anyone returning to the physical world would also return to their linear timeline. In Briar’s case, she would wake up as soon as she’d fallen asleep hundreds of years ago.”
“What about El and me? Where do we go?”
“Before she wakes up, I will send you back to the physical world with your treasure. You will awaken in your timeline—one hundred years later, as you said—and it will be as if you simply woke up from a dream. We will be gone by then, faded as quickly as your memory of this place, because I will make sure we won’t leave anything behind for the godmothers and Ezran to find us again.”
Corin rubbed her fingers over her temples as she pieced these plans together. She imagined Elly and herself thrown into the portal to their world once more. The new shapes of their lives once she claimed her treasure, and the glint of gold that promised them the kind of comfort only the wealthy could afford to have. And in a far, distant corner of her mind, the fleeting memories of a dreamworld that never existed. The blurry shape of a demon she never truly knew, and a girl named Briar Rose, a name she may not even remember. She could not decipher how she felt about this loss when she was supposed to have had nothing to lose in the first place.
She turned to Elly. “Are you following this?”
The middle part between her sister’s brows pinched in contemplation.
“If you had a second chance,” she murmured, “you’d take it, wouldn’t you?”
A small pang struck Corin’s chest. She knew the layers behind Elly’s words. People like them didn’t get second chances. They didn’t have magic or portals or special blood. Once something was done, they couldn’t take it back. Once something was lost, it couldn’t be returned.
The image of a broken fox figurine entered her mind. Even if she put the pieces back, it wouldn’t be the same. The cracks would still be there.
If Corin could return to a time before Elly said I hate you, she would.
“It’s settled then. Corin gets her treasure. I’ll open a new portal. Briar Rose continues sleeping. Everyone lives happily ever after,” Malicine summarized dryly.
“All right,” Corin conceded, “but where am I supposed to find this treasure?”
Briar inhaled a deep breath and held it, closing her eyes. There was a subtle shift in the air as they waited, a change in the wind. The sun grew warmer, seeping through the fabric of their clothes and radiating across their skin. Familiar tingles ran down Corin’s body, like fireflies chasing her at night from childhood. There were hot golden days and washed-out skies, the smell of fresh clay and new paint, vibrant colors and low hums as her father worked. A warm orange glow bloomed from the splash of sun on her mother’s canvas. For a moment, Corin was taken somewhere too. A collection of memories, fractured into vignettes, so vivid it almost felt real.
Briar opened her eyes and answered, as if she could see into Corin’s memories. “The treasure is in Summerland.”
The skies washed back from tangerine to blue as the air turned cool again. Gone were the earthy smells of clay, replaced by the timber and debris of their current surroundings. Corin returned to the present, and the shift in time startled her. She hadn’t noticed Penny and Dime digging through rubble to finish cleaning up, Malicine trekking the opposite direction, or Briar guiding Elly along for the new journey.
Corin tried to catch up. Her feet balanced across a broken beam, dodging bent shingles and glass shards. She looked up to meet Briar’s eyes. The weight of her gaze held something Corin couldn’t extract. There it was again, the quiet that gripped the two of them, an unspoken prickling of her skin. She turned away to snap their tether, yet still she was left with the split ends of it, making sense of the tangled rope wrapped around them.
She thought about the kiss of the sun, the glow of fireflies, the drops of sweat that only summer brought on. How in a brief moment, she felt like she was in a memory again—and what it meant if Briar Rose felt the same as well.