The rushing sound finally recedes and silence falls.
Imatra uncurls. When she sees how close she sits to the glitter grass, she scrambles away from it, kicking her legs in panic, causing the grass to hum dangerously. She slows, her breathing erratic, carefully unfurling her right arm from around her chest and finally revealing the object she clutches in her hand.
A glittering diamond as large as her fist catches the light of the rising moon.
In the present, I catch my breath. She told me my heart had burned to ash.
Inside the bulb, Imatra’s expression is dangerously dark as she peers closely at the stone, turning it to study its misshapen, jagged side, where a small chunk is missing.
“No,” she whispers, tears of rage falling down her cheeks. “It’s broken. Useless.”
She tips her head back, but before she can scream out her anger, my whimper sounds.
Imatra quickly presses the diamond into the ground behind herself, burying it in the thick ash so she can focus on my younger self.
The glow around my young body has receded, fading to nothing. I’m covered in ash. Within the image, I push up on my hands, trying to sit. My dull, white hair falls across my shoulders. My faded eyes blink slowly while I clutch my chest, the intense pain I’m feeling evident in my drawn expression.
It hurts. I still remember how much it hurt when I woke up.
My chest has healed, leaving only the small, crescent-shaped scar—disproportionately small compared to what was ripped out of me.
Imatra’s eyes widen as she stares back at me. I guess she thought she’d cut out all of my heart and that, even if I had retaliated, I died afterward. Tears continue to stream down her cheeks, perfect pearls spilling across the ground around her.
Her facial features quickly smooth out. She holds out her hands.
“Come to me, child,” she says, her voice soft and compelling. “Come away from the fire.”
Inside the image, I hesitate, but only for a moment before I crawl through the ash toward her.
Her grasping hands pull me against her side. “I’m sorry, child,” she murmurs as she strokes my hair. A slow smile crosses her face, a smile I never saw from my position cocooned against her chest. “I couldn’t stop the Fell. They took everything from you, but one day… you will take everything from them.”
The bulb goes blank. I stare at the emptiness inside it, trying to process the fact that my heart wasn’t destroyed.
What’s more confusing is that there’s one more bulb resting on my chest.
Nathaniel’s jaw is tight, his muscles tensing. He knows the full truth about how his father died now. His gaze flickers from the remaining bulb to me. “There’s more.”
Crushing the bulb I already hold, I stare, exhausted, at the remaining orb. “I don’t know if I can take any more.”
Nathaniel reaches for my closed fist, his features softening. I allow him to unfurl my fingers from around the vine that has formed and place my hand beside the final bulb.
“Truth is never easy,” he says, a storm of rage lurking behind his expression that he quickly hides from me.
I rub my forehead, the back of my hand resting over my eyes. “She stabbed your father in the back. She killed your people. What more did she do to you? To me?”
I want to crush the last bulb, not look at it. But until I face my past, the glitter field won’t rest.
I won’t rest.
With a steady exhale, I take hold of the final bulb. This one doesn’t knock me into the ground like the others. Instead, a freezing cold chill passes through me as if I plunged into icy water.
I shiver, take a breath, and cough, a wet sound because my mouth suddenly fills with liquid.
Gasping for air, desperate to let go of the bulb as quickly as possible, I hold it up to my eyes.
Inside it, Imatra stands beside the fae palace, its white towers rising up in the background. She teeters at the edge of the Spinning Lake, but its surface is quiet, glassy, not even a ripple.
With a heave, she pitches a glittering stone into its center—a gleaming diamond the size of her fist.
My heart drops.
The diamond falls below the surface of the lake inside the bulb. The moment the rock hits the bottom, there is a soft thud and the water begins to turn. It pulses in time with the heart’s beat until the lake churns smoothly around the diamond at its center.
In the present, icy liquid fills my mouth, choking me. I’ve felt the water’s icy clutches before—this drowning sensation—but I never imagined it was real.
Nathaniel grabs me, shifting so that he can turn me onto my side. Water spills from my mouth, whooshing out with my exhaled breath.
I crush the final bulb in my fist. It’s blank now—empty of memories again—while it rapidly transforms into another sharp vine. Sharp memories.
I curl up on the soft grass beneath me, shivering violently while Nathaniel curves over me, wrapping his arms around me so that his body heat can warm me. The buckles of his weapon harness dig into my side, but I don’t care.
He strokes my back, his hand running over my shoulder blades, down to my hips, but he is silent.
“My heart.” I sob-laugh, cry, and try to breathe at the same time. “The diamond at the center of the Spinning Lake is my heart.”
Chapter 17
Just moments ago, Imatra told me that my heart had crumbled into dust after she cut it out. Once again, she lied. Darkest of stars, I can’t be surprised by that. She will never stop lying.
“She hid my heart in plain sight,” I say, my voice wobbling with shock. “She told everyone the Spinning Lake was a monument to the final battle—to our victory over the humans. Dear stars… I slept in a room overlooking the diamond for the last seven years, and I never knew what it was. I never felt like it belonged to me.”
“We need to get it back.” Nathaniel’s eyes meet mine, his own determined, but I shake my head.
“It takes a hundred Frost fae to freeze the Lake in winter, and a hundred Solstice fae to unfreeze it in summer. Even with the power I have now, I doubt I’ll be able to break through to where my heart rests on the bottom. Even if I could…”
I close my eyes, taking deep breaths. “The stone in the Lake is broken. It’s what remained after the first shard was cut out. It never felt alive to me. It’s not like the piece you carried with you.”
The life in the shard Nathaniel kept safe all of these years was so immense that I was afraid of it. I have never felt that way about the diamond in the Spinning Lake. The irony doesn’t escape me that the largest piece of my heart never felt like mine, but the tiniest sliver felt like it had an entire universe trapped within it.
Nathaniel continues to rub my back, my arms. His thumb grazes my cheek, smoothing across my tears. “Do you remember the first time I kissed you?”
My body glows, sudden warmth flooding me at the memory. “I’ll never forget.”
He continues, his voice soft. “I thought that we’d done something wrong, because starlight speared up through the Lake. It poured through you into me. I didn’t know why or what to think.”
I become very still. “My heart must have been trying to connect… If you’d been wearing the sliver of my heart at that moment, then the three pieces of my heart would have been in the same place for the first time since Imatra had tried to kill me—the stem inside me, the body of my heart in the lake, and the shard you kept safe.”