Phoenix Flame - Sara Holland Page 0,97
a few weeks after the Silver Prince’s attack, Marcus had kept them relegated to the inn. Now, though, as they tracked down more and more leads, more silver traders, he and Taya had been called into the fray. And thank God. Lately, Nahteran felt like there was an electric current running beneath the surface of his skin. Like if he couldn’t be in motion, couldn’t take action, it would burn him up from the inside.
Taya shrugged. “Then I guess we better kick ass.”
Nahteran swallowed. He looked at her phone, fastened to the dashboard with a stand improvised from duct tape. The cracked glass screen showed a grainy sprawl of fields and straight roads—the landscape around them now—but up ahead, they’d go west into the mountains, where a red star blinked. Their destination.
About a month ago, the name had started tripping out of traders’ mouths, helped along by the Heiress’s truth serum. Janna Reynolds. It sounded so ordinary, so unremarkable, except for the way the traders said it. With a mix of jealousy and fear. She was a new trader to the scene, and a different kind than Whit and the others—locals who had heard the rumors about magic at Havenfall and decided to capitalize on it, working with unscrupulous delegates from Fiordenkill and Byrn to smuggle soul-silver from those worlds into this one.
No, Reynolds had money. Last week, they’d captured the trader Whit—the one who almost killed Maddie—and brought him to Havenfall, and he told them all about her. Hundreds of pieces of soul-silver lost from Havenfall over the years had ended up in her possession, even though she had never been to Havenfall herself, even though she was human. She had the magic of money, which Nahteran was learning was just as potent as Byrnisian fire. She bought soul-silver from the traders slinking around Havenfall and then sold the pieces at marked-up prices to buyers around the country. She did deals only once or twice a year, but when she did, powerful people flew in from all over the world. How much did she know about the nature of the magic? Nahteran wondered. Did she know that every bit of stolen magic was bought with a living soul?
And one of them his.
That’s what he hadn’t told Taya, hadn’t told anyone. That going through the records, he’d become familiar enough with the trader’s notations to start to see patterns. It was a strange thing reading about the splitting up of your own soul into a dozen strands, then used to bind magic to silver. The neat bloodlessness of it all. Ten pieces to the Silver Prince. One piece gone unaccounted for, which Nahteran figured had to be the jack necklace that Maddie wore. And one last piece sold to Janna Reynolds among hundreds of other objects over the years. A silver bangle, binding—appropriately enough—Byrnisian fire magic.
And now they were headed Reynolds’s way.
What would it feel like to be whole again?
The opposite of Havenfall, the Reynolds mansion was a low, boxy creation of stone and glass, a jutting presence on the mountainside. They could just make it out from down below on the road. The trees had been cleared away around the house, leaving a ring of violently green, militaristically trimmed grass. The narrow road off the highway where they turned ended in a dead end: a gate, closed and locked by an electric padlock.
Taya parked the car to the side of the road, and they began the arduous journey up the mountainside on foot, under the cover of trees, staying as silent as they could. Taya held out her cell phone, transmitting their location back to Marcus so he would know where to go with Sal and the others tomorrow. It was slow going, and Nahteran was acutely aware of her faraway expression as she glanced around at the trees. How much easier would it be if she could assume her animal form, with its long stride and padded paws?
But he wouldn’t be able to keep up. He had never been able to change his shape at will, like Taya and some of the other Solarians could. The best he could manage was getting some scales to rise along his arms and cheekbones, replicating the Byrnisian appearance that he had worn for so many years of his life.
“When you were in Solaria,” he asked, “were animal shapes grouped by family?” The real question underneath hung in his mind, a haunting echo. If I could access my animal form, would it