“I think this goes beyond moonflowers. We left something else behind, too. Your book. That’s how your godmothers learned to open portals in the first place. They put together the pages and went through the rubble for other relics. We should’ve been more careful instead of acting recklessly.”
“I know,” Briar agreed.
“So let’s wake up and try it again.”
Corin noticed the shift in Briar immediately, a flicker of fear in her eyes. Before the princess opened her lips to protest, Malicine put up their hand.
“I don’t mean right now. In the chance Ezran opens a portal and disrupts the dreamworld, I’ll use my amulet to wake you up. You’ll look for me again in the physical world. Then we’ll start over by escaping to a new dream.”
A dull ache throbbed at the side of Corin’s head from listening to the conversation. “Wait,” she interrupted. “How is it possible that she could wake up after hundreds of years?”
Malicine tossed Corin an impatient look, as if they were speaking a very simple concept that Corin was too idiotic to understand.
“Time is linear in the physical world, but it doesn’t exist in the dreamworld. Here, there is no past, present, or future. That means anyone returning to the physical world would also return to their linear timeline. In Briar’s case, she would wake up as soon as she’d fallen asleep hundreds of years ago.”
“What about El and me? Where do we go?”
“Before she wakes up, I will send you back to the physical world with your treasure. You will awaken in your timeline—one hundred years later, as you said—and it will be as if you simply woke up from a dream. We will be gone by then, faded as quickly as your memory of this place, because I will make sure we won’t leave anything behind for the godmothers and Ezran to find us again.”
Corin rubbed her fingers over her temples as she pieced these plans together. She imagined Elly and herself thrown into the portal to their world once more. The new shapes of their lives once she claimed her treasure, and the glint of gold that promised them the kind of comfort only the wealthy could afford to have. And in a far, distant corner of her mind, the fleeting memories of a dreamworld that never existed. The blurry shape of a demon she never truly knew, and a girl named Briar Rose, a name she may not even remember. She could not decipher how she felt about this loss when she was supposed to have had nothing to lose in the first place.
She turned to Elly. “Are you following this?”
The middle part between her sister’s brows pinched in contemplation.
“If you had a second chance,” she murmured, “you’d take it, wouldn’t you?”
A small pang struck Corin’s chest. She knew the layers behind Elly’s words. People like them didn’t get second chances. They didn’t have magic or portals or special blood. Once something was done, they couldn’t take it back. Once something was lost, it couldn’t be returned.
The image of a broken fox figurine entered her mind. Even if she put the pieces back, it wouldn’t be the same. The cracks would still be there.
If Corin could return to a time before Elly saidI hate you, she would.
“It’s settled then. Corin gets her treasure. I’ll open a new portal. Briar Rose continues sleeping. Everyone lives happily ever after,” Malicine summarized dryly.
“All right,” Corin conceded, “but where am I supposed to find this treasure?”
Briar inhaled a deep breath and held it, closing her eyes. There was a subtle shift in the air as they waited, a change in the wind. The sun grew warmer, seeping through the fabric of their clothes and radiating across their skin. Familiar tingles ran down Corin’s body, like fireflies chasing her at night from childhood. There were hot golden days and washed-out skies, the smell of fresh clay and new paint, vibrant colors and low hums as her father worked. A warm orange glow bloomed from the splash of sun on her mother’s canvas. For a moment, Corin was taken somewhere too. A collection of memories, fractured into vignettes, so vivid it almost felt real.
Briar opened her eyes and answered, as if she could see into Corin’s memories. “The treasure is in Summerland.”
The skies washed back from tangerine to blue as the air turnedcool again. Gone were the earthy smells of clay, replaced by the timber and debris of their current surroundings. Corin returned to the present, and the shift in time startled her. She hadn’t noticed Penny and Dime digging through rubble to finish cleaning up, Malicine trekking the opposite direction, or Briar guiding Elly along for the new journey.
Corin tried to catch up. Her feet balanced across a broken beam, dodging bent shingles and glass shards. She looked up to meet Briar’s eyes. The weight of her gaze held something Corin couldn’t extract. There it was again, the quiet that gripped the two of them, an unspoken prickling of her skin. She turned away to snap their tether, yet still she was left with the split ends of it, making sense of the tangled rope wrapped around them.
She thought about the kiss of the sun, the glow of fireflies, the drops of sweat that only summer brought on. How in a brief moment, she felt like she was in a memory again—and what it meant if Briar Rose felt the same as well.
CHAPTER 20
101 YEARS AGO
FOR AMELIA, DAYS repeated their tired pattern: hazy mornings bleeding into draining afternoons collapsing into listless evenings. She woke and slept, woke again and slept again, submitting to an endless routine that cut like a dull blade against her spirit.
One day, she woke up and realized she was running out of time.
It had been two months since Ezran’s proposal. Their wedding had occurred the following week. Her godmothers worked overtime for the celebratory event, arguing over dresses and decorations, fighting until the last minute that the bride and groom exchanged rings beneath the arch. The ceremony took place in front of the greenhouse. Since there was a year left before Amelia turned eighteen, they had no time to waste. The wedding was so rushed that they didn’t even invite most of the kingdom. Instead they promised to have a second, proper wedding in Zilar with Ezran’s family after the baby was born.
The baby. Amelia didn’t even want to think about that.
