Phoenix Flame - Sara Holland Page 0,73
know he’s still angry with me for what happened at Winterkill, and I’m angry with him for being angry. For not trying to fix us.
But unlike my mom, Brekken and I have time. I choose my words carefully, aiming for diplomacy. For lots of reasons, I’m not trying to start a fight with Nahteran.
“I really don’t think that giving the Silver Prince free rein over this planet is going to lead to anyone peacefully coexisting.”
“True enough.” Nahteran chuckles darkly. “But even the Silver Prince is not going to live forever.”
My brother takes his arm from my shoulders and grips the railing tight, like it’s the edge of a flying carpet. “Just imagine what could be if the Silver Prince weren’t in the picture, Maddie. All the realms, open. You and me and Taya in that new world, together.”
I glance over to see the hopeful, almost feverish light in Nahteran’s eyes. It’s kind of intoxicating. I’m almost ready to follow him into the wide unknown.
At the same time, though, I’m not so optimistic. “But the Silver Prince is in the picture. And he’s more powerful than all of us put together. The only reason he’s not steamrolling us right now is that he’s trapped in Oasis; we can’t just let him in and hope that it will all work out.”
I circle back to the most immediate question facing us. “Besides, Mom wouldn’t want us to give him the armor even if it meant saving her.”
I’m not sure of many things—like if what Mom wants should matter, or which option I want to go with—but I’m sure of that.
But as Nahteran looks at me and smiles, the expression so familiar and simultaneously so alien, I’m not sure if my brother feels the same way.
“Maybe,” he says. “But to me, a world without family isn’t much of a world at all.”
I wake up early the next morning, even after sleeping poorly. I had a hard time falling asleep and staying asleep even after staying up late talking to Nate. Like my body wants to stay on high alert for whatever else might go wrong in the night.
But the morning sky is bright and warm outside my window, and the birds are chirping in the pines. I open my window, and the sun and the sound lift my spirits. Maybe it’ll be okay. Nahteran, Marcus, Brekken, and Taya are all here, all the people I love who I once thought were lost to me. If we can get Mom back from the Silver Prince, I think out to whatever god might be listening, I won’t want for anything ever again.
I text Taya while I get dressed. I’ve not had a moment alone with her since she came back from Solaria, and I want to ask her more about that world, the place she found there.
And … While I really do want to know everything, I have another reason too. I need to ask her to intervene with Nahteran. To see if their bond—forged before I was even born—can get him to see reason, to stay with us. There has to be another way to get the armor to the Silver Prince, if that’s what we decide to do. But I don’t think I could bear to lose him a third time.
Nahteran’s words from last night replay in my mind, over and over again. Would it be the worst thing in the worlds if what the Silver Prince wants comes to pass? The Byrnisians aren’t responsible for what the Silver Prince does. Don’t they deserve a chance to live?
It feels like a paradox. If Oasis is really dying like Nahteran says, of course the residents deserve to live. Everyone does.
But the answer can’t be letting the Silver Prince blow holes in the barrier between the worlds. I still have nightmares from the fight with him in the tunnels. I can still see the cruelty in his eyes as he called wind and fire to his command, ready to end my life so he could take over Havenfall. I don’t think peaceful coexistence is his endgame. Even when I thought him my ally at the beginning of the summer, he was always a more “the ends justify the means” kind of guy. Not to mention he’s a lot of the muscle behind the soul trade. It almost makes it worse that he doesn’t care about the suffering of the Solarians. They’re just vectors to him, just tools to weaken the boundaries between Byrn and everything else.
It’s