blue, green, gold, white, purple grains mixed in with the black. She carefully picks out one pebble that looks like it could be unpolished sapphire and brushes off the dirt before plunking it into the palm of my hand.
“I noticed this when I was working in the gardens,” she says. “In Solaria, there are miles of blue stone beaches. All blue, under a gold sky.”
The picture takes shape in my mind. “It sounds beautiful,” I say in a hushed voice.
“I think delegates from all the Realms have brought their own soil to these gardens,” Taya says. There’s a current of feeling in her voice that I can’t identify. She sticks her hands in her pockets and gives me that lopsided smile. “But Solaria, yeah. Yeah, I was happy there.”
My heart twists in a weird happy-sad dance. Of course, duh, I want her to be happy. But there’s a not so small spiteful part of me that wants her to be happy on Earth. With me.
“I have a history there,” Taya says. “An extended family, even. That’s something I never had on Earth. I was scared at first to not know anything about the world. The people were kind to me, but I still felt out of place. And I missed you.”
That makes my breath catch. I’m trying to think of a reply when a snapped twig sound behind us makes me jump. I spin around to see Brekken striding down the path toward us.
My stomach drops, but not in the good way that it usually does when I see him. He looks like he’s here on business.
“Maddie,” he says when he’s within earshot, his voice clipped. “Taya.”
“What’s wrong?” I ask, foreboding gathering heavy inside my chest. What now?
“Maddie,” he says, his voice strangely clipped. “Can I talk to you alone?”
19
Taya leaves us without argument. She can tell when something’s wrong just as well as I can.
Once she’s gone, I don’t know if Brekken means to keep on walking or not, but the sudden silence and stillness that descends is awful. So I turn to the path again, beckoning for Brekken to come along.
We continue through the gardens. Brekken clearly has something to say, and I can tell from his manner that it’s not good. I’ve been so wrapped up in Taya and Nahteran that I’ve scarcely spoken to Brekken, and it’s just now occurring to me how much that must hurt. I know it would have hurt me, if the roles were reversed. Guilt and sadness sneak through me even before he speaks.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “About how I acted about Nahteran. How I told you not to trust him.”
I don’t know what I expected to hear, but it wasn’t that. Brekken hasn’t been acting sorry. He’s been cold and distant to Nahteran this whole time, and to Taya and me too, by association. I cock my head, confused.
“Why do you say that? Do you trust him now?”
Brekken smiles, but it has a wooden quality to it. His fists are clenched. “Not entirely, no, I’ll admit. Something about all this—the Silver Prince and the armor and your mom—it doesn’t feel right to me.”
“Then why say anything?” I challenge. “Why apologize if you’re just going to do the same thing?”
Brekken looks out over the mountains, his jaw working slightly. “I never wanted to hurt you, Maddie. And it’s clear that I have. I want to make you happy.”
“Well, I gotta tell you I’m not happy,” I snap. “Don’t you get that Nahteran has more reason to hate the Silver Prince than any of us? We only had to deal with him for a month. Nahteran has been with him for ten years.”
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of!” Brekken’s voice is layered with anger and distress. He stops walking and turns to face me square on. I stop too.
“Loyalties can change, Maddie,” he continues. “Remember Bram? He was a Solarian working for the Silver Prince too.”
I flinch at the memory of Bram—the man posing as the Silver Prince’s manservant at Havenfall, who was secretly a Solarian. Whom the Silver Prince murdered, slaughtering him in his animal form so that with his spilled blood, the Prince could open the door to Solaria and trigger chaos at Havenfall. And to top it all off, it looked like a monster had killed him, stirring up the hatred of Solarians in the rest of us.
“Nate is nothing like Bram.”
“Nate,” Brekken echoes, the word dripping with skepticism and even contempt. “Still the nickname, even after all this?”
That