She looked between Oro and Grim with the faint air of interest. “Both loved her, and both lost her, is that it?”
Grim’s shadows sharpened at her words. Oro stepped toward her, anger racing through his veins, hot and pulsing. “Yes, and thanks to you, I assume.” His gaze traveled to her throat. The Moonling wasn’t wearing her necklace. She had worn it all throughout the Centennial, and afterward. Isla had told him it had to do with the child she had lost.
Cleo didn’t even attempt to deny it. She simply lifted a shoulder. “She offered me a chance to get my son back. I took it.”
Oro mulled over her words. If the Moonling wanted to see her son again, that meant she had a vested interest in not only helping Isla make it to the otherworld...but also helping herreturn—with Cleo’s son, brought back from the dead.
Though he had never liked Cleo, partially due to what had happened the first time they had met, empathy eroded part of his fury. He looked at her now and saw that she wasn’t cold and heartless at all. She was a mother who would do anything to hold her son again. Just like he and Grim would do anything to save Isla.
“Then it seems our interests are aligned,” Oro said.
Now that he was in front of the Moonling, he remembered a conversation he’d had with her many months prior.
“You told me during the Centennial that the oracle gave you alone an additional prophecy. She said everything would change, five hundred years after the curses were spun.”
Cleo nodded simply. A wave crashed against the side of the boat, rocking them to the side, sea-foam melting down the cabin’s windows. “She did.”
Grim took a step forward. He had been quiet up until now—shockingly—but it seemed his patience had worn thin. His voice was scraped from the night itself as he said, “Tell us what else she said.” Shadows filled the cabin, smearing most of the sunlight away, and pointing into a dozen razor-sharp blades, all aimed at Cleo.
She barely spared them a glance, instead gazing at Oro and Grim in disdain. Oro was momentarily taken back in time to when she was his merciless Moonling instructor. Always looking at him like he was inadequate. She had almost killed him during his first night of training.
“If you think these shadows scare me,” she said to Grim, “then you are laughably wrong. I have faced the worst pain imaginable.Nothingscares me.” She bared her teeth at him. “I want my son back. That’s the only reason I helped her, and why I’m not throwing you both off my ship.”
Grim’s expression said that he would like to see her try, but luckily, Cleo kept speaking.
“The oracle said half a millennia after the curses, everything would change. This world would sit on the edge between complete doom and prosperity. She said someone born of life and death would decide the fate of this world. That this person would be marked by halves. Half curse, half cure. Half day, half darkness. This person would need to choose one side—without losing themselves in the process.”
He swallowed. This described Isla perfectly, and he was struck by how painful that would be...to live a life of halves. To be split.
He hated that she had been put in this impossible position, with an impossible choice. It had all been fated long before she had even been born. He had never wanted to be king, never wanted to bear so much responsibility on his shoulders...
But being king didn’t compare to the weight she carried—the weight of this world.
“There was something else,” Cleo said, almost reluctantly. “The oracle spoke of a war between worlds.”
“Worlds?” Grim asked.
The Moonling nodded. “A war that would decide the fate of the entire universe.”
Dread coiled through Oro’s gut. Their world had been through enough, with the curses, then the war between Lightlark and Nightbane, then Lark. He thought back to before the battle, when huge stretches of land on Nightshade had been reduced to ruin. How Lark had made an army of the dead. How hundreds had already been lost.
They couldn’t survive another conflict among themselves...let alone onebetween worlds.
“It has a name, this war,” Cleo said, breaking the uneasy silence that had settled over the room.
“What is it?” Grim demanded.
“Crowntide.”
He and Grim looked at each other. For a moment, Oro could see them as they were—enemies who would have to align not only to find the women they both loved...but to protect their world from destruction.
Cleo continued, “I always knew a portal would be opened someday. I never lost hope that there was a chance to get him back...I just didn’t know which side would serve me best.”
Oro ground his teeth. Cleo was a traitor. But he tasted the sweet honey of the truth within her every word. He didn’t doubt that she was motivated to tell them everything she knew. “If war is coming,” Oro said, “we need Isla here. On our side. How do we reach her in the otherworld? Do you know anything? Anything that could amplify his portaling flair?” He motioned toward the Nightshade. His shadows were still sharpened into points.
Cleo leaned against her desk, her white dress pooling around her feet. She searched Oro’s face before finally saying, “Your father was searching for a power his entire rule.”
A fold formed between Oro’s brows as he remembered how his father had sent countless emissaries and warriors out during his reign, clearly looking for something—for what, he wasn’t sure. He always assumed his father was trying to discover more lands. Though his father was a strong king, Oro never agreed with his relentless pursuit ofmore, his greed for what lay beyond the borders of the island.
