Phoenix Flame - Sara Holland Page 0,32

focus on breathing. I can feel my lungs again, and I wait for my senses to come back to me. My heart is hammering.

The first thing I notice is the wind. What I always knew as a faint, tinny whisper emanating from the other side of the Fiorden doorway is now a high, unceasing fury, centered somewhere very far above my head, twisting and rising and falling like the keening of a living thing. It pulls at my clothes, sneaks up the small openings at my wrists and ankles. If I didn’t have my face to the ground, pressed to my hands in a kind of downward dog position, I’m sure it would be blasting my face. The ground feels like packed snow—it’s sunk in a little under my weight. For a moment, I can’t hear anything but the wind, and panic fills me. Did something go wrong? Am I alone in Fiordenkill?

Then there’s a heavy thump somewhere off to my right, and a familiar sound as Graylin curses when he hits the snow and rolls. Slowly, cautiously, I raise myself up into a kneeling position. I feel like I’ve just done the most intense workout of my life. All my muscles ache, my heart pounds, and my senses come back on high alert, adrenaline pumping through me.

I’m in Fiordenkill.

More specifically, I’m in what looks like a large, grand stone courtyard, walled off with massive slabs of shimmering white marble. Set into the one behind me is a doorway that mirrors the one on the Havenfall side, through which I can see the drab mountain gray of our tunnels. The walls contrast with the starry night sky, blending in with the carpet of pristine white snow covering the ground. Pristine, that is, except for the places where our company has broken through. Graylin is getting to his feet by the far wall, smoothing out his long green wool cloak and pulling up the hood. Brekken stands a few yards away, at the entrance to the courtyard, already standing guard. Beyond him, I can see a strip of glittering road, and my heart thrills at the sight.

It’s so cold. Sitting up, I fumble in my jacket, scooting backward in the snow to be out of the danger zone. I pull my scarf out of my collar and take my hood off, quickly wrapping the scarf around twice and then pulling my hood back up. I thought I was prepared for the cold, but there’s something different about this even from the brutal Colorado plains winters I’m used to. It feels like this cold is deeper somehow, entrenched, maybe since it never lets up.

Spring doesn’t come to Myr. There are other countries in Fiordenkill that are more temperate, but not by much. Graylin once told me that Fiordens weren’t like humans, in that humans tended to view cold as something scary and bad, lonely, deadly. Fiordens don’t see it that way, he said, maybe because they don’t know anything else. Their berries and herbs grow just fine in the cold, and the animals they hunt and domesticate could only exist in the snow. I run through all the information I’ve learned from Graylin, from Brekken, from the library and the delegates as I stand up on shaky legs. Feeling like a moment that I’ve been waiting and preparing for my entire life is finally here.

I tip my head back, look at the sky, and gasp, the sound muffled by my layers of scarf. I had glanced up upon first coming through, but not really looked, not really seen until now. There are so many stars. Thousands, it seems like, and they’re bigger than the stars on Earth, closer. Instead of a uniform cool blue, they appear in all colors, blue and purple and red and orange and gold. And that’s not all. At the edge of the sky, a curtain of interwoven colors is appearing, creeping over the top of the marble wall. Shimmering strands of pale green and blue and pink, swaying gently between the stars like seaweed caught in a soft current. The aurora. It hovers at the fringes of the horizon now, but when it covers the whole sky, that’s the Fiordens’ signal to enter the doorway into Havenfall, for the summit to begin.

I cross over the snow to Brekken, my feet sliding awkwardly in the slightly-too-big boots I’ve borrowed. My body feels different in a way I can’t put my finger on. Lighter. Is it possible that there’s