Phoenix Flame - Sara Holland Page 0,25

…”

“An ill reputation?” I echo. “What does that mean?”

After a moment of indecision, I join him on the bed, keeping an inch or so of space between us. I feel like I’m finally getting somewhere with this Winterkill stuff, and I don’t want to be distracted … plus, it’s not really clear to me where Brekken and I stand. Yeah, he kissed me under the influence of truth serum, but it’s been a couple of days since then and we haven’t discussed it. What if he doesn’t want to take things further? What if he does?

“I don’t know the details,” Brekken says, a little evasively. “There always seems to be some lavish ball or other happening at his estate, even in frozen times when food supplies are low. And my parents have never gone. They say he’s corrupt. And no one’s quite sure how he made his fortune. His family raised birds”—he taps the icon on the gauntlet with one fingernail—“but there’s no way it all comes from that.”

My heart beats faster. A wicked lord, a misbegotten fortune? That lines up with what I know about the soul trade. “She had this too.”

I pull out the photo book and flip to the section where the man starts appearing. I only looked at a handful of pictures back in Mom’s room, but now, with Brekken, it feels easier to face. I hand it to him and let him turn the pages, leaning in close to look over his shoulder. He studies the same pictures I saw, looking intently. Then he turns the page, and I gasp.

It’s my mom again. But—somehow—she’s not in Havenfall. She stands on a snowy hill, bundled up in a thick peacoat, hat, scarf, gloves. Practically all you can see of her are her eyes, but those are enough to tell that she’s beaming.

Yet that’s not the astonishing thing about the picture. It’s the backdrop. The trees surrounding her are so tall that the branches aren’t even in the frame. The sky between the trees drips with aurora colors.

I’ve never seen this place, but I know immediately where she was. My mother was in Fiordenkill.

“How is that possible?” My voice is shaky as my hand reaches out, almost of its own accord, to trace the picture.

Out of the corner of my vision, I see Brekken shake his head. He doesn’t know. But I can’t tear my gaze from the image. My mom. In Fiordenkill. The colors surrounding her are ice blue and indigo and blinding white. And—gold, in the space between her coat cuff and mitten. Gold patterned with branches and leaves.

Brekken holds up the gauntlet. It’s too small an image to tell for sure, but I know we’re thinking the same thing.

“It’s like the story,” he says in a hushed, awed voice. “The knight traveler.” He turns his body toward me, and there’s almost a feverish light in his eyes. “Maddie, it’s real.”

7

The gauntlet.

Stories about knight travelers and dead enchanters.

The Silver Prince possibly having other access points to Earth.

Cancarnette’s scornful words about magpies, collectors of enchanted objects.

Mom being convinced that her involvement with Cadius Winterkill led to Nate’s kidnapping. The man she and everyone called the Magpie.

Mom wearing the gauntlet … in Fiordenkill.

I don’t know what it all adds up to, but it must be something. It has to be.

I sit across from Marcus in his office off the tunnels beneath the inn, trying not to fidget as he reads over my list of—clues? ideas? leads?—the things I wrote down to stop them all from ricocheting around the inside of my head. I watch his eyes rove from side to side. Laid out like this, I’m hoping he sees that it’s too much to be a coincidence. Mom brushed up against the soul trade when she had an affair with Cadius Winterkill, the Magpie. They were able to travel between the realms using the gauntlet—and now someone is traveling between realms to propagate the soul trade.

What are the chances that the Silver Prince has also found a way between the worlds? Could he be involved too?

Despite all of that, though, I can’t help but be distracted by the dark circles beneath Marcus’s eyes. Since the Innkeeper is tied to the inn, it hit him hard three weeks ago when the Silver Prince disrupted the natural balance between the Realms. Graylin and I didn’t know what had rendered my uncle unconscious—or if he would ever wake up. We thought he’d been the victim of a Solarian attack, his