It came as a frenzied string of words. Elly took a moment to register the question. “What?”
“If I wasn’t born, or someone else had taken my place—did you ever wish for that?”
The pain blooming on the side of her stomach had reached her chest, clenching the organ like a fist. She felt too raw, and perhaps that had been Briar’s fault, their conversation re-surfacing the fears she tried to hide: that maybe Elly would be happier if she had been stuck with another person, someone who wasn’t so resentful and bitter and cruel. Maybe the world would have been a little less miserable if it had been anyone else who took care of her.
“You definitely hit your head,” Elly said, “because you’re not making any sense.”
She pulled Corin out of the debris with no sign of resentment, just concern. The bare simplicity of it relieved Corin, if only for now.
The air shifted with magic as stones scattered from a gust of wind and Malicine rushed to Briar’s side, shouting her name. Penny and Dime helped roll the princess over to her back. A fallen beam had opened a gash in her skull. Corin expected blood, yet a strange patch of moss grew from the wound instead, trickling leaves down her temple, running vines that were supposed to be her veins. She bled flowers and greenery, her skin soft and thin like tissue paper wrapped around a bouquet. Tiny petals bloomed as her lashes fluttered open, as if she were waking up from peaceful rest.
“You’re all right,” Malicine sighed, placing a glowing hand over Amelia’s wound. The moss shrunk as Briar’s skin pieced itself back together. Aside from the gash on her head, the rest of her body remained a clean slate. She hardly looked injured, which should have been impossible. They had stood so close together, yet onlyCorin bore the brunt of the collapsed cottage. As if she were the target all along.
Malicine turned to Corin and snarled, “What did you do?”
“Nothing,” she replied through gritted teeth. She tried pulling the splinter from her side, but it only made the pain worse. Malicine gestured to her wound, and Corin felt the warmth of their magic, the slow release of the wooden fixture from her flesh. The splinter broke apart, and Corin’s stomach pieced itself back together along with her other scratches.
“So you’re telling me a natural disaster happened in a world where nothing here is natural,” Malicine said. “You were alone with Briar when the cottage broke down. You must have had something to do with it.”
“It’s okay, Mal,” Briar said. “No one was badly hurt.”
Her placating tone irritated Corin, the inflection too similar to her behavior inside the cottage when she feigned being carefree. It didn’t matter how often she played coy. Corin would remember how Briar’s face had gone pale, like a bare moon unveiled in the night. The princess was hiding something. If she could choose to live in an imaginary house filled with greenery and stone, she could also choose to have the house of her dreams break down by her own will.
“You did this,” Corin snapped. “You couldn’t handle me interrogating your past, so you almost killed me. You’d do anything to avoid confronting the truth. Is that why you’re hiding the treasure?”
“That’s enough.” Malicine’s voice was cold, sharp. “You dare—”
“No. Corin is right.”
Everyone turned to Briar in surprise. The animals clung to their petticoats and quieted down, as if evaluating if they would continue playing pretend.
“I abandoned Gyldan when there was no royal heir to look after the kingdom. It was my negligence that caused your suffering.” Briar pressed her hands flat over her dress, calming the butterflies that swarmed her. She took a deep breath, then looked at Corin in newfound resolution. “So I’ve decided that I will help you find your treasure. But it will not go to Ezran. It will stay with you.”
Corin didn’t know if she heard the last part correctly until the animals gasped. Malicine only blinked, though a knot formed between their brows. Even Elly was surprised, as she asked, “Why?”
Briar’s gaze softened. She raised a gentle hand and cupped Elly’s cheek.
“Because you two have lost enough.”
The words struck Corin. The sorrow seeping through. The truth in it. That was how she knew Briar meant her promise. She should have been relieved to see the princess making amends, yet her skin prickled with a wariness that refused to leave her body. She wondered how Briar could give up the treasure so easily. Perhaps the princess didn’t care for gold. Or perhaps she thought the certainty of being alone was better than risking any chance of loss at all.
“While it’s admirable that you suddenly want to do charity work, that doesn’t solve the issue of your godmothers making another portal,” Malicine said.
“We have time,” Briar replied. “It will be another hundred years before they can open another one.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I figured out how they did it.”
The breeze scattered daisies across the debris. Briar plucked one of the petals that fell from her hair and pressed it between her fingers, crumpled and graying instead of white.
“When I fell asleep, I had just turned eighteen, exactly the timewhen the moonflowers would bloom. I wore them when you opened the portal, remember? That’s why my godmothers couldn’t follow Corin and Elly, even though they replicated the spell. Moonflowers die as quickly as they bloom. There is a limited window for people to cross over, and it only opens every hundred years.”
Malicine crossed their arms. “That’s a long commitment. You suppose they will grow tired and simply give up?”
“No. Ezran is loyal. He will keep trying, no matter the cost.”
Her words seemed to have weighed on Malicine. Their shoulders sagged as they stepped carefully through the ruins, dragging their staff around the debris. They gestured to broken planks and pieced the walls together. The animals joined to help, the raven collecting plastic trinkets from the rubble, while Penny and Dime gathered stones in heaping piles. Eventually, Malicine enchanted one of the wicker chairs on the porch to stand upright and took a seat, hands clasped together.
