I groan in irritation, pressing my fingers roughly into my eyes until colors bloom. She’s said the same thing so many times, the words have begun to completely lose their meaning. “How am I supposed to recognize something I’ve never felt before?”
“Youhavefelt it. Many times.”
Frustration and worry fray my temper. “Just because you’ve been in my mind, doesn’t mean you know anything about me.”
My words are like the lash of a whip, harsh and sharp, and I turn away from Adira before I can see how they land. She might know my mind within the confines of Letum—a few thoughts here and there, a heated tangle of confusion and wonder—but she doesn’t possess the context of them. Like reading the last page of a book without knowing how the story began.
Adira doesn’t know the numb hollow I’ve existed in for so long, unable to feel anything atallaside from the burn of survival. And how, since arriving in Letum, there’s been so many feelings, I’ve been drowning in them. And it feels impossible to explain—how spending so long muddled in shades of gray makes the overload of color Letum possesses actuallyhurt.
My feet ache as I pace, the chilled surface of the rock sinking into the silk slippers. For a petulant moment, I consider chucking them off the side. Losing the slippers forever would be its own sort of magic.
“Imagine the shoes different,” the princess replies to my thoughts. “And they will be.”
When I turn back to her, she doesn’t seem at all affronted by my outburst. Or at all concerned by my absolute failure to produce even the slightest hint of something magical. Her eyes are still closed, her pretty face relaxed and untroubled.
“You’ve done it before.”
I shake my head. “I’ve only brought the nightmares to life, Adira. Never anything good.”
The words tumble from me before I can trap them. They spill into the open like acid, bringing hot tears to my eyes and tightness to my lungs. The truth of my fear—that in claiming my power, I’ll only make everything worse.
In Letum. At home. It’s all I’ve ever done. I’ve never made a place better by being there, never made someone better for knowing me.
It’s always the opposite.
I’ve condemned Niko for ruining everything he touches, but it was never the act of it I loathed—it was the mirror. Because if forced to look at it for too long, I’d see myself in the ruination.
And though I’ve managed to shove down those feelings for so many years, here, where everything is so vibrant, they bring an unignorable lump to my throat.
Adira stands, and though the top of her head only reaches my shoulder, she rises to her tiptoes to place both of her hands softly on each side of my face. Her eyes swirl like a storm over the sea, and the urge to pull away, to hide from her magic, races through me. I keep still, even as her gaze bores into mine, as tendrils of something both soft and wild caress my thoughts, like the rush of a spring wind sweeping through my brain.
I gasp at the sensation; at the realization she isn’t just reading the thoughts in my mind now—buteverythought. Adira sees the past and the present and the future layered on top of one another.
“You wished to be invisible when the Strayed captured you on the beach, and so you became.”
I rear back in shock, brushing her hands away in a desperate attempt to keep her from seeing anything more, but Adira’s gaze doesn’t waver as it penetrates my thoughts. “You imagined you understood Marina, and now you can.”
As if in response to her words, my skin heats and my thoughts begin to whirl in a blurred haze. Like a tether inside me has snapped, leaving me floating somewhere above the ground.
“That wasn’t—Ididn’t do those things, it was the…”
Thewhat?The island?
“The island is made of dreams, Willa, and you know better than most that dreams contain no innate mercy,” Adira replies airily. “It has seen victim after victim fall to the Strayed, children and adults alike. It never bothered to save them, and it certainly wouldn’t now.”
I know she’s right, even as I fight against it. Against what it means.
Adira lowers her chin, her gaze pulling like a latch beneath my ribs. “You’ve been giving your power away since the moment you arrived instead of owning it. Embracing it.”
“What are you talking about?” I half-yell in exasperation.
“You did notfallhere.” Adira’s voice is like the whip of a branch. “Your arrival was not a machination of the island, nor some happy accident.”
“Well, I didn’t jump off the building willingly!”
Adira cocks her head, her eyes narrowing. “Something may have called you toward Letum when the fabric between dreams and waking was thinnest. But the reason you’re here isn’t because you tumbled off a building. You’re here because during the fall, youwishedto be here.”
My objections die in my throat.
