Like she was monstrous.
“I’ll try harder,” Isla said, quickly. “I’ll...I’ll train earlier. Later. Everything. I promise—I promise I’ll get better. I won’t let you down.”
From Terra’s expression, Isla knew she already had.
Her guardian made her train through the night to make up for the time she had missed while she had been unconscious. Only then was she allowed a bath and healing elixirs.
Poppy, her other guardian, gently wrapped her wounds. “It’s okay, little bird,” she said. “You won’t scar.”
That wasn’t true. Some scars, Isla thought, weren’t visible at all.
By the time Poppy left her quarters, Isla slumped forward. Finally, she was alone. Tears stung her eyes, but she pressed her hands against them. There were only a couple of hours for her to sleep before training began again.
She slipped from her blankets, went into her closet, and pushed past the training clothes. There, in the very back, was her collection. Pieces she had found in her room, over the years, that together formed a mosaic of her mother.
There was the doll, shaped from wood, with its dress made of petals that were somehow still soft and everlasting.
There was the jagged broken comb. She slowly traced her finger along its edge. Did her mother hate when Poppy brushed her hair as much as Isla did?
Did she sometimes get hurt during training too?
Finally...there was a paintbrush. The wood was long and slender, with soft hair at the top. Bits of color still clung to the strands.
Was her mother a painter? She didn’t know. She searched and searched, but the room didn’t reveal any other secrets.
“I wish I could fall through time and know you,” she whispered into the darkness of her closet. “Maybe then, I wouldn’t feel so alone.”
Isla wasn’t allowed to leave her room, except for training. It was to keep herself safe. Her people could not find out their ruler was powerless. Their realm was already in enough trouble. Without her power to inject into her lands, people were dying. Hiding her, Terra said, was an act of love.
Isla’s only solace in spending day after day locked away was that she knew her mother had once lived here too. Isla would look for cracks in the wall, marks on the floor, any sign that her family had existed.
Isla fell asleep clutching the paintbrush, desperate to feel a whisper of her mother.
Isla swallowed, a knot formed in her throat—and blinked out of the memory. The child she had seen in the forest was gone.
What—
A branch broke behind her. Isla turned, only to see Lark leaning against a tree, folded over. Panting.
Maybe this was her chance. Isla still had Cronan’s blade and the god-bone. Perhaps she could plunge both right through Lark’s heart while she was weakened.
As if sensing the thought, Lark’s head snapped up. Her green eyes were as bright as ever, even as her body was in tatters.
“That won’t kill me, so don’t waste your precious energy,” she spat. Her frown deepened at Isla’s incredulous expression. “I do not lie.”
Isla wondered why Lark wouldn’t have escaped while she had the chance. She knew Isla wanted her dead.
But Lark shuddered, looking haunted.
“You see them too,” Isla said. “The memories.”
Lark sighed. “This is a wicked place. The forest forces you to walk through your past.”
“Which way do we go?” Isla asked. She spun around and saw nothing but endless woods on all sides. She didn’t even know where her destination was.
“The only way out is through,” Lark grumbled. She took a step—
And Lark’s eyes went blank, like their spark had been smothered. She stood still as a corpse, her brow furrowed in concentration.
