Phoenix Flame - Sara Holland Page 0,83

while. She puts me to work stuffing and shaping tortellini alongside her, which is more responsibility than I usually get—my cooking skills are minimal enough that Willow usually relegates me to chopping or stirring duty. Which makes me think she wants an excuse to talk to me. It’s still a couple of hours before the meal, and the other staff—the Fiorden and Byrnisian pages—are all off doing other chores, so it’s just Willow and me in the cavernous kitchen.

“You’re distracted today,” she remarks, casually glancing at me out of the corner of her eye. Her hands move in a graceful almost-blur, creating a half dozen perfectly formed pasta shapes in the time it takes me to do one, all somehow without getting flour on her blue silk day-dress.

I’ve wondered, often enough, if she is happy here, happy to spend all her days at the inn. She seems to be, but I’m not sure I would be if I were in her shoes. She’s smarter than all the delegates, and everything about her speaks to having had a glamorous past life. Is she like Graylin, content at the crossroads, or like Brekken, who deep down I know never would be?

The question is out before I can think about it. “Willow, if not for Havenfall, where would you be?”

Her hands keep moving, but she turns her head and looks at me in surprise. We’ve never talked much about her life in Byrn—she doesn’t seem to like it, usually changes the subject. But now she just looks at me steadily.

“I would be a nomad,” she says. “Out in the wild beyond the walls of Oasis.”

“A nomad,” I echo. Like Nahteran was telling me about.

She nods. “My standing in the court was already shaky”—she winks, maybe in reference to the affair I’ve heard rumors about—“but the last straw came when I wouldn’t renounce my magic. The Silver Prince requires all his subjects to make that choice. Magic or safety.”

I nod. “I’ve heard.”

She pauses her work and turns her right hand up toward the ceiling. A tiny cyclone forms there, a perfectly self-contained dervish. I stare. The breeze coming off it gently carresses my face for a moment before Willow closes her fingers and it winks out.

“I was never very powerful, but all the same, my magic is a part of me,” she says, her eyes distant. “So I talked to Marcus about staying here permanently, and here we are.”

She elbows me to keep working, the moment of seriousness gone. “So whatever you’re plotting, spare a thought for us strays for whom this is our only home.”

That last sentence is delivered lightly, a joke, but it lands like an anvil in my chest.

A few minutes later, Willow bustles off to do something else. I continue my slow progress with the tortellini. When I finally have a dozen lined up before me, my phone buzzes in my pocket.

Glancing around to make sure Willow isn’t watching, I wipe my floury hands off on my jeans and check my phone. On the lock screen is a text from Taya.

Hey, Nahteran got a message back from SP. We’re good to go.

I stare at the glowing words. My heart starts hammering, the bitter taste of fear seeping into my mouth. In my mind’s eye, I see the Silver Prince up on the mountain, just like in my paranoid imaginings earlier. Hands raised, flaming and deadly.

Now, with a few hours’ reflection, our carefully wrought plan seems reckless to the point of idiocy. I can’t fight for shit. Taya can’t control her transformations. I don’t know about Nahteran’s skill set, but something tells me even if I did, I doubt I’d like our odds. We need more help.

I open the message and type a reply. A thumbs-up symbol. Then,

I was actually just thinking we could use more backup. OK if I ask Brekken?

For a moment after I send the text, there’s nothing. Then the three dots that mean Taya’s typing. Then nothing again. Finally, the text pops up, shorter than I’d expected from all that typing.

Sure, I guess so.

I don’t see Brekken at dinner, so afterward, I head up to his room, a Tupperware full of pasta in hand as a peace offering. It’s late—I didn’t really realize how late until now. I hear him get up, shuffle around, and turn on the lamp. When he opens the door, he’s still in the loose short pants and spun linen shirt he sleeps in, like he was about to go to bed. It