All the spoilers ahead... When the inhabitants of the island of Lightlark were cursed, the leaders of each realm took a few of their people and left the island, except for the Sunling ruler who stayed on the island as King of Lightlark. Until the prophecy that will break the curse is fulfilled, the island disappears in a terrible storm, reappearing every one-hundred years for one-hundred days only, giving the rulers a chance to break the curse before disappearing again. Isla (isss-la, not eye-la) Crown, the ruler of the Wildlings, has a starstick that allows her to travel great distances in seconds, and no one knows she has it. If they, her guardians (Poppy, her charm teacher and Terra, her fighting teacher) would take it from her. In fact, Isla has been kept enclosed in her rooms with no one but Poppy and Terra for company, for the safety of everyone around her. She isn’t even allowed to speak to her own people, the Wildlings. Since the curse of Lightlark was cast, Wildling people must eat hearts to survive, and they kill anyone they fall in love with. Since girls have always been more prevalent and there is so much death involved with their curse, the Wildlings have become a mostly female, warrior society. Now it’s time for the Centennial to start, and Isla must travel to Lightlark alone. She promises to follow the orders of Terra and Poppy during the Centennial, to use their strategy to try to break the curse, and then goes through a portal to the island. She takes her starstick with her. Isla is the first ruler to appear, quickly followed by Grimshaw, or Grim, of Nightshade. Nightshade has not been invited to any Centennial before this year, they can spin curses and are a prime suspect of who cast the curse. Seems like the other rulers are getting desperate in order to invite Grimshaw this year. Azul of Skyling shows up next. Both Azul and Grim were alive when the curse was cast five-hundred years ago and have ruled their realms since then. Cleo of Moonling comes next, the oldest of them all, not that she looks it. Last to portal through is Celeste of Starling. The island of Lightlark used to be the home of all these peoples, each claimed its own area of the island with the Mainland in the center, where they all gathered and where Lightlark royalty lived. There’s a castle on the Mainland where the Sunling ruler, and King of Lightlark, lives. The Sunling ruler also happens to be the last Origin and can wield the powers of all the realms still inhabiting Lightlark: Sunling, Starling, Skyling, and Moonling. The realms of Wildling and Nightshade have completely left Lightlark, and so he has no powers from those realms. He’s also said to be paranoid. The five rulers go to the palace and are met by a personal attendant for each of them, Isla’s is a Starling girl. She is taken to her rooms, where the girl stokes the fire even though it’s already warm, explaining that the king has commanded the fires be kept burning at all times. After the Starling, the Starling ruler, Celeste, shows up to Isla’s rooms. Turns out, she and Isla know each other already. When Isla had found the starstick in her mom’s things five years ago, it had eventually taken her to Celeste, and the two of them became friends. Both of them young women, rulers, and desperate to end the curse for their people. Celeste’s curse may be the worst of them all, all Starling die by the time they turn twenty-five years old. Celeste only visits a moment before returning to her own room, they want to keep their friendship a secret from the others. Isla goes to her balcony to sing and is surprised by someone on their own balcony a few yards away, she falls off the balcony and down to the ocean below. She wakes up soaking wet and choking on salt water, but safe on her own balcony and alone. The person who scared her must have done so and then left. But why would they bother saving her at all? When the curse was laid, the six rulers of the realms killed themselves to provide their heirs with a prophecy that would instruct them on how to break the curse. Their deaths fueled power to their realms which made the Centennial possible at all, otherwise the island would constantly be consumed by a terrible storm which cannot be traveled. The prophecy the heirs were given has three parts. 1. The six realms must be joined in some way. 2. The original offense will be committed again. 3. A ruling line must come to an end, meaning that one of the rulers must die. Only then will one of the six rulers win, and the curses will be broken, which honestly seems like a win for all of them. So why would someone save Isla? Seems like an easy way to fulfill a portion of the prophecy. Isla goes to dinner, still recovering from her near death, and realizes that the person who saved her is the King of Lightlark, Oro. At dinner she is served a heart, as a Wildling should be, but asks to have it sent to her room out of respect of the others. Turns out, she was born without the curse, or the power, of Wildling. It’s part of the reason she was locked away and kept in seclusion, so no one would know. Terra and Poppy believe that Isla has no power because her mother fell in love but failed to kill the man. Instead, he killed her only minutes after Isla was born. I’m sorry, is this curse not compulsory? Because Isla has no power, she cannot infuse her realm with power, and it is dying. More than that, she has no power to draw in at the Centennial, making her easy prey. And if she dies without an heir, her realm and all of its people die with her. The next morning, the rules of the Centennial are laid out. Assassinations may not be attempted until halfway through. On day twenty-five, they’ll be paired up. You cannot kill your partner, ever. No matter how much you may want to. Each ruler must attend all the events. And none of the rulers may have an heir. Isla befriends her attendant, Ella, by giving her a healing ointment for Ella’s injured leg, and Ella agrees to bring her food daily. Then Isla goes to the agora, the city center, and runs into Grim on the way. A few decades before the curse, Nightshade and Lightlark had gone to war. Grim had been one of Nightshade’s fiercest warriors then. Lightlark had won and a treaty brokered between the two, but there are still some hard feelings between the two realms. Grim’s father had been the ruler of Nightshade when the curse fell. Grim and Isla walk to the agora together and Grim tells her he can read flashes of emotion. She asks if he has a flair, a rare power that is not attributed to their realm. He does, but he doesn’t tell her what it is. But it’s not mind reading, or anything else he could use on her without her knowing. The two go to a chocolate shop, then to the tailor where Isla gets a new wardrobe started. She also asks the tailor to make her clothes she can fight in, and armor. Grim recommends she get a weapon as well. Isla and Celeste have a plan to break the curse, the bondbreaker. Celeste had read about it in a book, it can break any bond… including a curse. It demands blood in order to work, enough to kill someone, so they want to split the cost between them and hope that it breaks their curses but doesn’t kill them. But they have to find it first, it’s supposed to be in a library. Each ruler gets to plan a trial, called a demonstration, designed to test the other rulers. Grim’s trial is first, a duel. He gives them an hours’ notice and invites all of Lightlark to watch. No wonder he recommended Isla get a weapon; he was helping her. But why? He pits ruler against ruler and none of their special powers are allowed. Oro beats Azul quickly and easily, Cleo beats Celeste but not as quickly, then Isla, dressed in her new armor and with her new sword, faces Grim. He’s a tough opponent but she beats him, and he’s delighted for some reason. Then Cleo and Oro duel, Oro wins but Cleo wounds his arm. Last, Isla and Oro face off and she changes her tactic for their fight. She almost defeats him but at the last second remembers herself, and her plan to not draw attention so she can try to find the bondbreaker and lets him win. Oro is not fooled, she can tell. That night Isla speaks to Celeste, who knows Isla’s secret and is worried that Isla put a target on her own back. Celeste searched the Star Isle library for the bondbreaker, but she did not find it. Isla will search the libraries on the other isles, she’s already stolen clothing from the tailor so she can blend in on the other isles. Except Sunling clothing, she couldn’t find any at the tailor. Celeste has heard a rumor that Sunling is withdrawing from the other isles. And that Moon Isle has posted guards on their bridge so only Moonlings can enter. Something strange is going on. Celeste plans on getting a special type of glove that can hold a slight amount of magic in them from one of the other realms. It will help Isla with her searches. When Isla goes to the next group dinner, she walks into another demonstration where all of Lightlark’s nobles have been invited. Azul asks each of the rulers to show off their powers. Not great, since Isla doesn’t have any. Grim goes first, causing the entire room to have the same vision. Cleo gathers all the wine in the room and creates an actual shark, which tries to eat her, but she turns it to ice before it succeeds. Celeste makes fireworks explode throughout the room. Azul conjures three storm clouds, complete with lightning, before calming and releasing them. Now it’s Isla’s turn. She asks Oro for help, pulls a small Morningstar from her hair, blindfolds herself, and knocks the crown off of Oro’s head from across the room. Wildlings are supposed to be fierce warriors as well as able to manipulate nature. No one says anything, shocked at her performance. Oro goes last, turning the marble table to gold. An impressive display of power that not even his people knew he possessed. He wins this demonstration as well. Isla meets Juniper, a barkeep who deals in information. She trades him one of her secrets (that she beat could have beat the king in their duel) for information on how to get past the Moon Isle guards (on full moon nights, there will be no guards, since their curse makes the sea deadly during the full moon). Celeste hosts her demonstration next, in the Hall of Glass, the rulers must conquer their greatest fear. Whoever does so quickest will win. She reveals a Starling relic, a mirror that will show them their greatest fear when it’s touched, trapping them until the fear has been conquered. People have been trapped unable to conquer their fears for so long that they’ve died. Oro goes first. He conquers his fear in three minutes, but they aren’t able to see what it was that he saw. Azul manages five minutes, as does Celeste. Grim comes in at just under three minutes, Cleo does it in only two. When Isla reaches the mirror, it shows her back in her room, locked away from the real world, as the room closes in on her. Her world gets smaller and smaller. She breaks out in six minutes. After everyone leaves, Celeste shows Isla the handprints and essences of each of the rulers that the mirror had collected on its surface. Celeste uses the new gloves to store those essences so that Isla will be able to go into the restricted parts of each isle’s library. Celeste dresses in Skyling clothes and uses a Wildling potion to temporarily dye her hair blue, in order to sneak into the Sky Isle library. She finds the secret area but no bondbreaker and is reckless in her disappointment as she walks back to the palace, she’s spotted by Cleo. Cleo follows her and Isla runs for it, right into Grim. He causes the two of them to disappear until Cleo gives up her search and leaves. Isla ignores all of Grim’s questions, thanks him, and leaves. She gets a notice in her room that her demonstration is next. She goes to find Grim, to apologize for running off, but runs into Azul instead. He explains how hard the past Centennials have been, for various reasons, and shows her a cave system he can use as an instrument, and the two of them spend the afternoon listening to the music. She finds Grim that evening and offers him a thank you for helping her, she tells him what her demonstration will require. Her trial invites all of Lightlark and asks each ruler to show what their realm can create that benefits Lightlark as a whole. The audience will vote for the winner, they are not allowed to vote for their own ruler. Skyling has been working on a form of communication that uses the wind. Moonling has built many ships. The Starling found a way to create tools and weapons using their power only. Sunling has a way to spread light and heat throughout the island. Grimshaw walks in and announces that Nightshade has nothing to offer the rest of them. Isla shows them the Wildling healing remedies. To demonstrate, she puts her arm in a flame until it is badly burnt, then pours a remedy over the skin, returning her arm to normal as if it had never been injured at all. Although it does still hurt, but not as badly as it should, the arm does not look damaged. Grim comes to Isla that night, explaining that he has no interest in making allies or winning the Centennial at all. Of course, he doesn’t tell her why he is on the island if he doesn’t want to take part in the Centennial, but he does give her a history lesson. Lightlark was not created by only Oro’s ancestor, as most think, but by Grim’s ancestor as well. Then they both got greedy and fought until Grim’s father signed the treaty, ending their war. Cleo’s demonstration comes before Isla’s arm is fully healed again. They have to jump into freezing cold water and their hearts will lead them to their greatest desire. Whoever listens and gets to their desire first wins. Before they start, Isla recognizes a rash in Oro’s wrist. She correctly diagnoses it and tells him how to treat it. They enter the water and at first Isla is not sure which way to go. One side feels like her people, the other feels like more. She finally follows her heart to the more side and makes it out, but barely. She doesn’t even see what the plaque that indicates her desire says before being rushed to her room to warm up. Cleo wins this demonstration as well. Of course, even though her arm is still mending and she’s is now suffering from hypothermia, the next night is the full moon and Isla has to break into the Moonling library. She finds a way into the Moonling palace, having to scale the walls and go through a window. As she tries to find the library, she is spotted and fights three guards, knocking them unconscious. She runs to the library, which is completely disguised, more guards following her. She can’t find the Moonling relics but can hear the guards outside. She realizes that Cleo is building an army. Isla trips and hits her head on the floor, in doing so she realizes that the relics are below the floor floating in water. She doesn’t see the bondbreaker among them but realizes that her head is bleeding. The guards outside yell that the entire legion is outside the library and Cleo is coming, Isla uses her starstick to portal out before they can get in. Now we know that the bondbreaker is not on Star Isle, Sky Isle, or Moon Isle, there is no isle for the Wildling or the Nightshade, which leaves only Sun Isle, but Isla has no way to get clothes to be able to sneak in. They are all invited to afternoon tea, where they sample three different kinds of tea. After they’re done drinking, Oro announces that this is his demonstration, a truth tea. Together the dregs of the three cups spell out their greatest secret. Whoever shares their secret first wins. First Celeste, then Azul, Isla, Grim, and finally Cleo breaks their glasses. Oro wins as he tells them his secret: that he is dying. He tells them that the island has been weakening since the last Centennial. He believes this is the last chance they have to break the curse. The torches and fires he demands stay lit are to mask that he is weakening, he should be able to keep the island comfortable with his power. For the second part of the Centennial, the rulers break into teams to fulfill part of the prophecy. Now that Oro has won the demonstrations, he gets to match the rulers up. He puts Celeste with Cleo. He chooses Isla as his own partner. Oro visits Isla that night and explains that he has a theory about the curse, and he needs her help to test it. It requires a knowledge of nature that she has, and in return, he would try to protect her from the other rulers. She agrees on one condition, she can save a second realm from being wiped out when they chose which ruler to kill. They start right away, but Oro tells her that she can’t look like the Wildling ruler while they’re searching. There are ancient creatures that believe the Wildlings abandoned them when they left Lightlark, and they will exact revenge on Isla if they find her. So, she needs to dress down, and continue to “mask” her powers. He takes her to the edge of the island, where the storm is waiting for the Centennial to end so it can cover the island again. The two of them take a bridge over the water to a smaller section of the island and go into a cave, the entrance of which is in the ground, and you have to blindly jump in, landing in some water. Oro tells Isla that he is looking for the island’s heart. It blooms every hundred years during the Centennial, it has to be nourished by and protected by a plant. This cave has a sample of all of Lightlark’s plant life, Isla finds three possible types of plants that the heart could be attached to. Oro knows of two areas in Lightlark that has a large quantity of said plants, one in Skyling and one on the Mainland. The search the Skyling field over several days but find nothing. Isla has a spicy dream about Grim and wakes up deciding to take a sleeping potion that will hopefully prevent any more dreams, even if she isn’t really hating them. On her way to the kitchen for ingredients, she hears Oro and Azul talking. It sounds like Azul has a dangerous plan that Oro is not in favor of, but Isla doesn’t hear much else. They start to search the Mainland area that night. Isla asks Oro about his talk with Azul, but Oro insists that Azul is no threat to her. She asks about kids who have parents from different realms, they only get power from one. Oro tells her they are near the Wild Isle, but everything on there is dead since the Wildlings left. He told her the Wildlings were once his favorite realm behind his own, long ago. Now they are as bad as they’re described to be. Over the next few days, she asks Oro more questions as they search. He tells Isla that Cleo puts the good of her realm before all else. That killing one of the other rulers is the easy part of the curse. Deciding which realm to get rid of is hard, they have to make the right choice. It can’t be Grim, he is the only thing between them and something even more dangerous, delightful. Once they’ve checked all the possible places in the second location, Isla walks deeper. She ends up finding a wall of plants with thorns and barbs. She calls to Oro, thinking that this plant has something serious to hide, and what’s more important than the island’s heart. But when she calls, the plant attacks her, and Oro has to rescue her. When Isla is safe and removing the large barbs from her back, which is incredibly painful, Oro checks for the heart but finds nothing there. There are other places the plants grow in, but not so many in one place. He decides they need to talk to an ancient creature to get help, one of the ones with a grudge against Wildling. Five days of rest later and Isla plans to meet with Celeste in the agora, but she is interrupted by a Moonling that passes her a note, she’s in danger. Isla pursues the Moonling and walks right into a trap, several Moonling nobles who are prepared to kill her. Luckily, Celeste followed her and frees Isla, together they kill the nobles and leave a message in blood for Cleo: try harder. Grim seeks Isla out after weeks of not seeing her. He asks if she wants to see him or be left alone, she says consistently left alone, but she’s lying, and he probably knows it. He tells her that he should not see her, for the good of them both. She asks about what Oro said about Grim protecting them from something worse than the curse and Grim does not deny it, but doesn’t tell her more, not wanting to distract her from the Centennial. So, she asks him to take her to the Wild Isle instead, she wants to see it for herself. When they arrive, everything is dead as Oro had said, but there is a palace still standing. It’s called the Place of Mirrors. Isla goes in and sees something she recognizes. She goes back that night without Grim, it’s a symbol that she recognizes as a hidden door, since there’s one in her chambers in the Newlands. But this one won’t open, it needs some sort of key that she cannot find. She asks Juniper for information, and he doesn’t have any about a hidden room, but he does know that only Wildling power can be used within the Place of Mirrors. Interesting. On her way out of Juniper’s bar, Grim sees her again. They share a tension riddled rainstorm together and Isla realizes that maybe she judged the Wildlings that fell in love more harshly than she should have. It is eight days before Oro fetches Isla again. She and Celeste use this time to investigate the Sun Isle library, which they discover is heavily guarded and always full. No way they’re getting in unnoticed. Oro said it took several days to find the ancient being and then more to broker a deal, but he managed it. They go together to Star Isle, where they meet a specter. Something the king did not mention, the specter wants to possess the body of the most beautiful woman on the island for a few moments before she will help them. After some yelling, and Oro agreeing to take Isla to his library, Isla agrees to being possessed. She wakes up once the specter is out of her body, in Oro’s arms. The specter tells them that the heart is not on this isle, and that the darkness below is awakening. As if they don’t have enough to deal with already. Isla wants to go to the library right then but Oro refuses to take her, she didn’t specify when they’d go when they made their deal. Instead, she waits three days and goes to the library by herself, not trying to hide who she is. Joke is on her, Oro has someone waiting to lead her to the library and he’s closed it all week, so she can be there alone. She quickly finds the secret spots where the relics are hidden but there is no bondbreaker. And that’s the last library they have to search. Her plan with Celeste is a bust. The ball that indicates the halfway point of the Centennial is held; at midnight the rulers are allowed to kill each other as long as they are not paired together. Isla shares a moment with Grim and he gifts her a necklace that will summon him if she touches it (he makes it invisible after she’s wearing it) before he disappears. He says he will be back at the ball before midnight. When Isla returns to the main ballroom, everything falls apart. Literally. As in, the island itself starts to fall apart. Oro is in great pain but is able to stop the ballroom floor from rupturing any more than has already happened, but barely. Part of the palace is ruined, and the islanders are afraid to leave their houses. Oro and Isla visit the next ancient creature, a blue bee man who lives in a hive of other blue bee people. He captures Isla (that was the plan) but when Oro comes in after her, bee man slices his throat. Not enough to kill Oro right away, but he will die soon. Blue bee man tells them that he doesn’t not know where the heart is this time, but he has seen it before, and it always grows where light and dark meet. Isla is in a hurry to get Oro to water so he can heal his throat, but he passes out before they make it. She’s able to drag him the rest of the way, throwing his body in a shallow river and allowing the magic to do its thing while she keeps him from drowning. Before he’s completely healed, and before he’s awake, the sun is going to come up. If he’s caught in the sun, he will die as part of the Sunling curse. She drags him to a cave for safety. When he wakes around noon, he has some ideas. There are eight places on the island that would match the riddle. They have to wait in the cave until the sun goes down. Or Oro does, and Isla chooses to wait with him. They ask each other questions to pass the time, answering each question honestly. What’s life like where Isla is from (terrible), what’s his favorite place on the island, did she know Grim before the Centennial (no), has he ever been in love (no), is there a bondbreaker on the island (no), how long has he been able to gild (since he was a kid). He asks what her secret is, and she doesn’t answer. She asks what his flair is, and he doesn’t answer. He says he will tell if she does, but still no. Then he offers that if she tells him her secret, he will let her win the Centennial. He believes that the heart has some Sunling and Nightshade power stored in it and that the original offense mentioned in the prophecy is that someone used the heart to set the curses, used the Nightshade power in it specifically. He thinks finding the heart will free them and whoever does so will receive great power. He doesn’t want that power; she can have it if she tells him her secret. She still says no. They search all the places they can easily but find the heart at none of them. Oro believes it must be on Moon Isle. They go to a block of ice on the isle where Isla sees three women frozen, Oracles. Oro unfreezes one of them and the Oracle tells them that she’s been warned not to speak to them (by whom?) but she’s intrigued, so she will anyway. The heart is on Moon Isle, closer than they think, but they have to find it on their own. She warns Isla that she is surrounded by lies and liars, and that one of the rulers will die before the Centennial is over. Then she freezes again. Oro says there are three places on Moon Isle, but they don’t have time to check them that night. They will search the first spot tomorrow. In the morning, she uses her Starstick to look at Wildling, and it is dying. The land is dead and pulling the magic from the people themselves, killing them. There’s nothing she can do to help them, powerless as she is, and she realizes she does need to win the Centennial to save her realm. She tells Oro her secret, then leaves the room. That night he calls a meeting of all the rulers to share progress and tells the other rulers what he and Isla have been doing. He wants to change partners, choosing Cleo as his own, asking that they be able to search Moon Isle freely, and putting Isla with Grim. When Cleo questions his motives, he doesn’t hesitate to tell everyone that Isla has no powers. Before any of them can kill her, Grim grabs her hand and they disappear together. Turns out, he doesn’t just turn invisible like she thought. He can actually move to other places, his flair, and he’s risking letting everyone else know he has this ability in order to protect her. He tells her that he already knew she had no power. Nightshades can read curses so he knew she wasn’t affected, and he kept her secret for her. If anyone hurts her, even attempts to, he will destroy them. She believes him. Grim helps Isla move into the Place of Mirrors, where the other magics cannot be wielded. Celeste knows where she is, as does Ella, who brings Isla food and water. Celeste continues to look for the bondbreaker. Celeste comes one day and tells Isla to snap out of it, the game is not done yet. They have a month left! She can’t just hide on Wild Isle until the Centennial is done. Isla sends Ella to see Juniper, offering details about her biggest secret in exchange for his own. He responds few days later saying that he knows who cast the curses. When Isla and Celeste go to meet him, they only find his dead body in the empty agora, the words “hard enough” scrawled in blood. Isla goes on a run while hiding on Wild Isle and gets near the Mainland, where she sees Cleo skulking around. She apparently decides that Celeste was right and follows Cleo into Moon Isle. She watches Cleo move a bunch of ice to reveal a hole, just as Isla is discovered. Isla yells that she knows Cleo cast the curses and killed Juniper. Cleo retorts that Isla is a fool and doesn’t know what she thinks she does, trapping Isla in a giant block of ice before going down the hole. Isla can’t get out of the ice and can’t call for help, she eventually loses consciousness. Lucky for her, Oro finds her and rescues her. He takes her to his rooms and explains that there was a place on Moonling that he could not access without Cleo. That’s why he needed to bring Cleo in and to partner with her. He couldn’t tell Isla his plan, she needed to genuinely react like she’d been betrayed. He told Isla’s secret because it made sense that he would want to be re-paired but also because Cleo thinks Starling should be the realm to go. While she was paired with Celeste, Cleo could not kill Celeste, but revealing Isla’s secret made Cleo rethink her choice of which ruler should be killed. Because Oro believes that Starling is essential. But now that Oro and Cleo have checked that one location, the heart was not there, he and Isla can work together again to check the other two. By the way, he knew she had been lying to him. He knew every time she lied to him. His flair, he can tell when someone is lying. They decide to work together again. But first: Carmel. Carmel is a twenty-four-hour carnival to mark the seventy-fifth day of the Centennial. Isla goes for part of the celebration; the rulers are not allowed to miss a Centennial event. Isla accidentally gets drunk and when she makes it back to the palace, is escorted to her rooms by Oro. It turns out, he commanded the Sunling armies and fought against Grim, who commanded the Nightshade. It’s why he hates Grim. Oro leaves to go to Carmel once the sun goes down and Isla is interrupted by a pounding at her door. It’s Ella. Celeste has been attacked. When Isla runs out of the palace, she finds Celeste floating, surrounded by a silver fog and thin string. Oro is also there when Isla arrives. This is an old enchantment that he hasn’t seen for a long time, one that should have killed her but was interrupted. A poison that Celeste has to fight on her own. If they try to heal her with Moonling magic, it will only make the poison kill her faster. It could be weeks before she wakes up, if she wakes up at all. Isla calls to Grim and asks him to hide Celeste until she wakes up, afraid that whoever was interrupted will come back to finish the job. Isla goes back to Wild Isle, intent on opening the hidden door but gets absolutely nowhere before she has to return to the palace to search for the heart with Oro. She almost gets killed by a dark mer creature, but they don’t find the heart in the first place they look. Which leaves one last location to search, in the center of Vinderland territory. The Veinderlands are Wildlings who renounced their power and realm before the curses, who already tried to kill Isla when she was trapped in ice. She and Oro will go the next night, but they take a visit to the armory first. When they get to the Vinderland territory, there’s a fight and they kill a bunch of Vinderland cannibals. They search a giant ice tree but find nothing. They decide to go back to the beginning. Oro had read about the heart in a secret library, he takes Isla there and reads the passage to her. One thing first, the island was created by his ancestor Horus Rey, Grim’s ancestor Cronan Malvere, and Isla’s ancestor, Lark Crown. Lark made the land itself; the island is named after her. Only one of their three realms can use the heart. Which means that Cleo did not cast the curse. It was either Sunling, Nightshade, or Wildling. They go through the book until they’re exhausted and decide to take a break. Isla goes to see Celeste, who is still floating, hidden where only Grim and Isla know where she is. Isla grabs Celeste’s hand, and a blue diamond ring falls out of Celeste’s hand. A blue diamond ring that Isla gave to Azul when they first met. Isla goes to the Place of Mirrors and pulls the pendant that Grim gave to her, he comes to her in a panic since he thinks she’s in danger. She asks him about Lark Crown, he confirms the story, telling her that he thought she should find out in her own time. She asks if he’s hiding anything else from her, he is. Like how he thinks about her all the time. They get romantic and it feels familiar to Isla somehow, and she notices a large scar on his chest. She and Oro continue looking for clues about where the heart is, and Isla wonders if it only blooms when light meets dark. Where they meet but also only when they meet: dusk and dawn. Suddenly, she believes she knows where the heart is. She goes with Oro to where she believes the heart will be and they wait in a cave so that he won’t be hurt when the sun rises. While they’re in the cave, Oro has painful tremors again as the island shakes and heaves, but she is able to help him by singing. When the sun begins to rise, the heart reveals itself as an egg. Isla goes out to grab it, and just as she does, Vinderland comes for revenge and shoots her through the chest. Oro kills them but can’t get to her to heal her since the sun is out. She pulls her necklace and Grim shows up. Isla loses consciousness as she drops the heart. She wakes up with Grim at her side, he took her to her room in the palace. He doesn’t know how she lived but she did. He also tells her that he found an ancient Wildling elixir that was able to wake Celeste. Isla goes to Celeste, and Celeste confirms that it was Azul who attacked her. Isla tells Celeste everything that happened has happened since she was poisoned, and runs back to her room, not stopping even when Celeste calls to her. Oro brings Isla the heart and asks her to meet him in the library. Once there, he tells her to pick the realm she will save. She chooses Starling, and he tells her that Nightshade has to go. He has Azul and Cleo backing him. Isla runs away from him with the heart, and she makes a plan. One that will save her realm, her friend, and Grim. It involves the bondbreaker. Isla tells Celeste where the hidden library is and Celeste sneaks in to get the bondbreaker, they will meet at the Place of Glass. Isla then calls Grim, and he teleports himself and Isla as close as he can. Once they get there, he reveals another secret. These dreams of hers, they are actually memories. She’s been visiting him using the starstick for a year. They’re in love, but he had to take her memories of him away before the Centennial started. That’s why he feels so familiar to her, and he’s been in love with her the whole time. She feels betrayed and runs to meet Celeste, they use the bondbreaker together. As it works its magic, Oro shows up to the Place of Glass as well, neither he nor Grim can get to Isla. And she has been betrayed! It’s not a bondbreaker but a bondmaker! Celeste isn’t Celeste at all, but Aurora, the ruler of Starling from the night the curses were cast, who should have died with the rest of them. She had been set to marry Oro’s brother Egan, but he fell in love with Violet Crown instead, Aurora’s best friend. She used her shape shifting flair to turn into a Wildling and approached Grim, convincing him to bring her the heart (he didn’t know what it was at the time). Aurora couldn’t use it the way she wanted since she is not Sunling, Wildling, or Nightshade, but she was able to curse everyone else, the curse did not touch her since she was the one who cast it. Then she used the heart to create an illusion, where she killed herself like the other rulers, and she took the identity of her younger sister. She has ruled Starling this whole time, changing her identity every few years. She bided her time, having been told about the bondmaker by Egan, but you can only use it once and she wants the powers of all six realms. When people from two realms have a child, that child only has power from one realm, or so they think. But Celeste tells Isla that her father was a Nightshade general, and she has the power of both. Nightshade was just shadowing the Wildling powers, making it invisible so that Isla thought she was powerless. But Isla let something slip to Grim one of the times she visited him with the starstick, and when he sought out Celeste, Grim recognized her for who she really was. Celeste convinced him that she would not rest until Egan’s family line was wiped out, that the original transgression was Sunling falling in love with Wildling, to break the curse Oro would need to fall in love with Isla. But that would never happen, because Isla and Grim were already in love, Isla wouldn’t allow it. So, Celeste convinced Grim to take Isla’s memories. It’s why he has stayed away from her, even encouraging her to befriend Oro. Then once Oro loved Isla, Aurora could kill Oro, they could break the curse and Grim would return Isla’s memories to her, and he and Isla could rule Lightlark together. But when a ruler falls in love with another ruler, they relinquish some of their power to the one they love. Oro, as King of Lightlark, has power from all the realms on Lightlark (Sun, Moon, Star, and Sky). And he is in love with Isla. When Celeste took Isla’s blood, she took the all the power that Isla, Grim, and Oro had. The power of all six realms. But Isla has always thought she was powerless, that doesn’t mean she is without power. She pulls out the starstick from where she keeps it against her back and portals to the Wildling Newland. The betrayal doesn’t stop with Celeste/Aurora. She had called Isla a nickname only Poppy and Terra ever used, and Isla knows they’re in on the plan somehow. When she gets to the Newland and sees Poppy, Poppy confirms her suspicions. She and Terra killed Isla’s parents to make Isla the ruler of Wildling in time for the Centennial, Celeste had said it was that or she would destroy all of Wildling herself. Isla doesn’t have time for retribution on Poppy, not yet. She dons her armor and arms herself with blades, then goes back to save the only person who has never lied to her: Oro. She portals back to fight Aurora using the starstick. Aurora has the power of all six realms and no curse to keep her in check. She can’t leave the Place of Glass, even if killing her means Isla isn’t leaving either. As Isla and Aurora fight, Grim gets Isla’s attention and reminds her of her heart. Her heart that was pierced with an arrow and healed by Lightlark’s heart. Using the power within her heart, she calls the island’s heart to her. She is infused with its power, grabs the bondmaker, and pierces Aurora’s heart with it, pulling all the power from Aurora and killing her. This the first offense, the murder of a friend: Isla kills Celeste as Aurora killed Violet. The Starling line is now at an end. A ruler has won. And as the curse is broken, so does Lightlark. A giant fissure cracks underneath Isla, and she drops the heart into the center of Lightlark as she falls into the chasm after it. She now knows she has all this power but doesn’t know how to use it, and neither Grim nor Oro can access their own power while in the Place of Mirrors. But she is caught by a vine, someone above is using her Wildling power, transferred to them by the love that Isla feels. Grim had tried and had not been able to help her because her love for him had been broken by his betrayal, Oro had saved her. Grim is furious at what this means. He disappears into the night. All the spoilers ahead... When the inhabitants of the island of Lightlark were cursed five-hundred years ago, the leaders of each realm took a few of their people and left the island, except for the Sunling ruler who stayed on the island as King of Lightlark. Until the prophecy that will break the curse is fulfilled, the island disappears in a terrible storm, only reappearing for one-hundred days every one-hundred years, giving the rulers of the isles a chance to break the curse before disappearing again. Isla (isss-la, not eye-la) Crown, the ruler of the Wildlings, has a starstick that allows her to travel great distances in seconds, and no one knows that she has it. If her guardians (Poppy, her charm teacher and Terra, her fighting teacher) knew, they would take it from her. In fact, Isla has been kept sequestered in her rooms with only Poppy and Terra for company, for the safety of everyone around her. She isn’t even allowed to speak to her own people, the Wildlings. Since the curse of Lightlark was cast, the Wildling people must eat hearts to survive, and they kill anyone they fall in love with. Since girls have always been more prevalent for the Wildlings and there is so much death involved with their curse, the Wildlings have become a mostly female, warrior society. Now it’s time for the Centennial to start, when travel to the island becomes possible and Isla must go to Lightlark alone to try to break the curse with the other rulers. She promises to follow the orders of Terra and Poppy during the Centennial, to use the strategy they’ve come up with to try to break the curse, and then she goes through a portal to the island. She takes her starstick with her. Isla is the first ruler to appear, quickly followed by Grimshaw, or Grim, of Nightshade. Nightshade has not been invited to any of the Centennials before this year. Since they can spin curses and are the prime suspect for who cast the curse. Seems like the other rulers are desperate to break the curse if they’re willing to invite Grimshaw this year. Azul of Skyling shows up next. Both Azul and Grim were alive when the curse was cast five-hundred years ago and have ruled their realms since then. Cleo of Moonling comes next, the oldest of all the rulers, not that she looks it. Last to portal through is Celeste of Starling. The island of Lightlark used to be a home for all their people, each claimed their own area of the island with the Mainland in the center where they all gathered and where Lightlark royalty lived. There’s a castle on the Mainland where the Sunling ruler, and King of Lightlark, lives. The Sunling ruler also happens to be the last Origin and as such, can wield the powers of all the realms still inhabiting Lightlark: Sunling, Starling, Skyling, and Moonling. The realms of Wildling and Nightshade have completely left Lightlark and so he has no powers from those realms. The Sunling king is also said to be paranoid. The five rulers go to the palace and are met by a personal attendant who’s been assigned to each of them, Isla’s is a Starling girl. Isla is taken to her rooms, where the girl stokes the fire even though it’s already warm, explaining that the king has commanded the fires be kept burning at all times. After the Starling attending Isla leaves, the Starling ruler, Celeste, shows up to Isla’s rooms. Turns out, she and Isla secretly know each other already. When Isla had found the starstick in her mom’s things five years ago, it had accidentally taken her to Celeste, and the two of them became friends. Both of them young women, rulers, and desperate to end the curse for their people. Celeste’s curse may be the worst of them all, all Starling die by the time they turn twenty-five years old. Celeste only visits Isla for a moment before returning to her own room, they want to keep their friendship a secret from the others. Isla goes to her balcony to sing and is surprised by someone listening from their own balcony a few yards away, she falls off the balcony and down to the ocean below. She wakes up alone, soaking wet, and choking on salt water, but safe on her own balcony again. The person who scared her must have saved her and then left. But why would they bother saving her at all? When the curse was laid, the six previous rulers of the realms killed themselves to provide their heirs with a prophecy that would instruct them on how to break the curse. Their deaths fueled power to their realms which made the Centennial possible at all, otherwise the island would constantly be consumed by a terrible storm which cannot be traveled through. The prophecy the heirs were given has three parts. 1. The six realms must be joined in some way. 2. The original offense will be committed again. 3. A ruling line must come to an end, meaning that one of the rulers must die. Only then will one of the six rulers win, and the curses broken, which honestly seems like a win for all of them. So why would someone save Isla? Accidental drowning seems like an easy way to fulfill a portion of the prophecy. Isla goes to dinner, still recovering from her near death, and realizes that the person who saved her is the King of Lightlark himself, Oro. At dinner she is served a heart, as a Wildling should be, but she asks to have it sent to her room out of respect for the others. Isla doesn’t actually need to heat human hearts. Her secret: she was born without the curse, or the power, of a Wildling. It’s part of the reason she was locked away and kept in seclusion, so no one would know her terrible secret. Terra and Poppy believe that Isla has no power because her mother fell in love but failed to kill the man as the curse requires. Instead, he killed her only minutes after Isla was born. Apparently, this curse is not compulsory. Since Isla has no power, she cannot infuse her realm with power, and it is dying. More than that, she has no power to draw on at the Centennial, making her easy prey. And if she dies without an heir, her realm and all its people die with her. The next morning, the rules of the Centennial are laid out. Assassinations may not be attempted until halfway through. On day twenty-five, they’ll be paired up. You cannot kill your partner, ever. No matter how much you may want to. Each ruler must attend all the events, no exceptions. And none of the rulers may have an heir. Isla befriends her attendant, Ella, by giving her a healing ointment for Ella’s injured leg, and Ella agrees to bring her food daily to hide the fact that she doesn’t eat human hearts. Then Isla goes to the agora, the city center, and runs into Grim on the way. A few decades before the curse, Nightshade and Lightlark had gone to war. Grim had been one of Nightshade’s fiercest warriors then. Lightlark had won the war, and a treaty brokered between the two realms, but there are still some hard feelings between the two. Grim and Isla walk to the agora together and Grim tells her he can read flashes of emotion. She asks if he has a flair, a rare power that is not attributed to their realm. He does, but he doesn’t tell her what it is, but admits that it’s not mind reading, or anything else he could use on her without her knowing. The two go to a chocolate shop, then to the tailor where Isla gets a new wardrobe started. She also asks the tailor to make her clothes and armor she can fight in. Grim recommends she get a weapon as well. Isla and Celeste have a plan to break the curse, and it revolves around the bondbreaker. Celeste had read about it in a book, it can break any bond (name makes sense) … including a curse. It demands blood to work, enough to kill someone, so they want to split the cost between the two of them and hope that it breaks their curses but doesn’t kill them in the process. But they must find the bondbreaker first, it’s supposed to be in a library. During the Centennial, each ruler gets to plan a trial, called a demonstration, designed to test the other rulers. Grim’s trial is first, a duel. He gives them one hour’s notice and invites all of Lightlark to watch. No wonder he recommended Isla get a weapon; he was helping her. But why? He pits ruler against ruler and none of their special powers are allowed. Oro beats Azul quickly and easily, Cleo beats Celeste but not as quickly, then Isla, dressed in her new armor and with her new sword, faces Grim. He’s a tough opponent but she beats him, and he’s delighted for some reason. Then Cleo and Oro duel, Oro wins but Cleo manages to wound his arm. Last, Isla and Oro face off and she changes her tactic for their fight. She almost defeats him but at the last second remembers herself and her plan to not draw attention so she can try to find the bondbreaker and she lets him win. But she can tell that Oro is not fooled. That night Isla speaks to Celeste, who knows Isla’s no power secret and is worried that Isla has put a target on her own back. Celeste searched the Star Isle library for the bondbreaker, but she did not find it. Isla will search the libraries on the other isles, she’s already stolen clothing from the tailor so she can blend in on the other isles. Except Sunling clothing, she couldn’t find any at the tailor. Celeste has heard a rumor that Sunling is withdrawing from the other isles and that Moon Isle has posted guards on their bridge so only Moonlings can enter. Something strange is going on. Celeste plans on getting a special type of glove that can hold a slight amount of magic in them from one of the other realms. It will help Isla with her searches. When Isla goes to the next group dinner, she walks into another demonstration – this time only Lightlark’s nobles have been invited. Azul asks each of the rulers to show off their powers. Not great, since Isla doesn’t have any. Grim goes first, causing the entire room to have the same vision. Cleo gathers all the wine in the room and uses it to create an actual shark, which tries to eat her, but she turns it to ice before it succeeds. Celeste makes fireworks explode throughout the room. Azul conjures three storm clouds, complete with lightning, before calming and releasing them. Now it’s Isla’s turn. She asks Oro for his help with her demonstration, pulls a small morningstar from her hair, blindfolds herself, and uses the morningstar to knock the crown off Oro’s head from across the room. Wildlings are supposed to be fierce warriors as well as able to manipulate nature, no one said which power she needed to show off. Everyone stands quietly, shocked at her performance, until Oro performs. He is the last to demonstrate, turning the marble table to gold. An impressive display of power that not even his people knew he possessed. He wins this demonstration as well. Isla meets Juniper, a barkeep in the agora who deals in information. She trades him one of her secrets (that she beat could have beat the king in their duel) for information on how to get past the Moon Isle guards (on full moon nights, there will be no guards, since their curse makes the sea deadly during the full moon). Celeste hosts her demonstration next, in the Hall of Glass where the rulers must conquer their greatest fear. Whoever does so quickest will win. She reveals a Starling relic, a mirror that will show them their greatest fear when it’s touched, trapping their minds until the fear has been conquered. People have been trapped unable to conquer their fears for so long that they’ve died. Oro goes first. He conquers his fear in three minutes, but they can’t see what it was that he saw. Azul manages five minutes, as does Celeste. Grim comes in at just under three minutes, Cleo does it in only two, breaking Oro’s winning streak. When Isla reaches the mirror, it shows her back in her room, locked away from the real world, as the room closes in on her. Her world getting smaller and smaller. She breaks out in six minutes. Last place, but not too bad a showing. After everyone leaves, Celeste shows Isla the handprints and essences of each of the rulers that the mirror had collected on its surface. Celeste uses the new gloves to store those essences so that Isla will be able to go into the restricted parts of each isle’s library. Celeste dresses in Skyling clothes and uses a Wildling potion to temporarily dye her hair blue, in order to sneak into the Sky Isle library. She finds a secret area in the library but no bondbreaker and her disappointment makes her reckless as she walks back to the palace. She’s spotted by Cleo. Cleo follows her and Isla runs for it, right into Grim. He causes the two of them to disappear until Cleo gives up her search and leaves. Isla ignores all Grim’s questions, thanks him, and leaves. She gets a notice in her room that her demonstration is next. She goes to find Grim to apologize for running off but runs into Azul instead. He explains how hard the past Centennials have been, for various reasons, and shows her a cave system that he can use to make music, and the two of them spend the afternoon listening to the melody. She finds Grim that evening and offers him a thank you for helping her, she tells him what her demonstration will require. Isla’s trial invites all of Lightlark and asks each ruler to show what their realm can create that will benefit Lightlark as a whole. The audience will vote for the winner, but they are not allowed to vote for their own ruler. Skyling has been working on a form of communication that uses the wind. Moonling has built many ships. The Starling found a way to create tools and weapons using their power only. Sunling has a way to spread light and heat throughout the island. Grimshaw walks in and announces that Nightshade has nothing to offer the rest of them. Isla shows them the Wildling healing remedies. To demonstrate, she puts her arm in a flame until it is badly burnt, then pours a remedy over the skin, returning her arm to its normal appearance as if it had never been injured at all. Although it does still hurt, but not as badly as it should, the arm does not look damaged. Grim comes to Isla that night, to explain his answer at her trial. He has no interest in making allies or winning the Centennial at all. Of course, he doesn’t tell her why he is on the island if he doesn’t want to take part in the Centennial, but he does give her a brief history lesson. Lightlark was not created by Oro’s ancestor only, as most think, but by Grim’s ancestor as well. Then they both got greedy and fought until Grim’s father finally signed the treaty, ending their war. Cleo’s demonstration comes before Isla’s arm is fully healed again. They must jump into freezing cold water where their hearts will lead them to their greatest desire. Whoever listens and gets to their desire first wins. Before they start, Isla recognizes a rash in Oro’s wrist. She correctly diagnoses it and tells him how to treat it. They enter the water and at first Isla is not sure which way to go. One side feels like her people, the other feels like … more. She finally follows her heart to the more side and makes it out, but barely. She doesn’t even see what the plaque that indicates her desire says before being rushed to her room to warm up. Cleo wins this demonstration as well. Of course, even though Isla’s arm is still mending and she’s now suffering from hypothermia, the next night is the full moon, and Isla needs to break into the Moonling library. She finds a way into the Moonling palace, having to scale the walls and go through a window. As she tries to find the library, she is spotted and fights three guards, knocking them unconscious. She runs to the library, which is completely disguised, while more guards follow her. She can’t find the Moonling relics in the library but can hear even more guards outside. She realizes that Cleo is building an army. Isla trips and hits her head on the floor, in doing so she realizes that the relics are below the floor floating in water. She doesn’t see the bondbreaker among them and realizes that her head is bleeding. The guards outside yell that the entire legion is outside the library and Cleo is coming, so Isla uses her starstick to portal out before they can get in. Now we know that the bondbreaker is not on Star Isle, Sky Isle, or Moon Isle, there is no isle for the Wildling or the Nightshade, which leaves only Sun Isle, but Isla has no way to get clothes to be able to sneak into the library there. All the rulers are invited to afternoon tea, where they sample three different kinds of tea. After they’re done drinking, Oro announces that this is his demonstration, a truth tea. Together the dregs of the three cups spell out their greatest secret. Whoever shares their secret first wins. First Celeste, then Azul, Isla, Grim, and finally Cleo breaks their glasses. Oro wins as he tells them his secret: that he is dying. He tells them that the island has been weakening since the last Centennial. He believes this is the last chance they will have to break the curse. The torches and fires he demands stay lit are to mask that he is weakening, he should be able to keep the island comfortable with his power alone. For the second part of the Centennial, the rulers break into teams to fulfill part of the prophecy. Since Oro has won the most demonstrations, he gets to match the rulers up. He puts Celeste with Cleo. He chooses Isla as his own partner, which leaves Azul with Grim. Oro visits Isla that night and explains that he has a theory about the curse, and he needs her help to test it. It requires a knowledge of nature that she has and in return, he would try to protect her from the other rulers. She agrees on one condition, she can save a second realm from being wiped out when they chose which ruler to kill. They start right away, but Oro tells her that she can’t look like the Wildling ruler while they’re searching. There are ancient creatures that believe the Wildlings abandoned them when they left Lightlark, and they will exact revenge on Isla if they find her. So, she needs to dress down and continue to “mask” her powers. He takes her to the edge of the island, where the storm is waiting patiently for the Centennial to end so it can cover the island again. The two of them take a bridge over the water to a smaller section of the island and go into a cave, the entrance of which is in the ground. You must blindly jump in and will land in some water. Oro tells Isla that he is looking for the island’s heart. It blooms every hundred years during the Centennial, and it has to be nourished by and protected by a plant. This cave has a sample of all Lightlark’s plant life, Isla finds three possible types of plants that the heart could be attached to. Oro knows of two areas in Lightlark that has a large quantity of those three plants, one in Skyling and one on the Mainland. They search the Skyling field over several days but find nothing. Isla has a spicy dream about Grim and wakes up deciding to take a sleeping potion that will hopefully prevent any more dreams, even if she isn’t really hating them. On her way to the kitchen for ingredients, she hears Oro and Azul talking. It sounds like Azul has a dangerous plan that Oro is not in favor of, but Isla doesn’t hear much else. Oro and Isla start to search the Mainland area that night. Isla asks Oro about his talk with Azul, but Oro insists that Azul is no threat to her. She asks about kids who have parents from two different realms and learns that they only get power from one. Oro tells her they are near the Wild Isle, but everything there has been dead since the Wildlings left. He told her the Wildlings were once his favorite realm (besides his own) long ago. But now, the Wildlings are as bad as they’re described to be. Over the next few days, she probes Oro with more questions as they search. He tells Isla that Cleo puts the good of her realm before all else. That killing one of the other rulers is the easy part of the curse but deciding which realm to get rid of is hard, they have to make the right choice. It can’t be Grim, he is the only thing between them and something even more dangerous, delightful. Once they’ve checked all the possible places in the second location, Isla keeps exploring and finds a wall of plants with thorns and barbs. She calls Oro, thinking that this plant has something serious to hide, and what could be more important than the island’s heart. But when she calls out, the plant attacks her, and Oro has to rescue her. When Isla is safe and removing the large barbs from her back (which is incredibly painful), Oro checks for the heart but finds nothing there. There are other places where the plants grow, but not so abundantly. He decides they need to talk to an ancient creature to get help, one of the ones with a grudge against Wildling. Five days of rest later and Isla plans to meet with Celeste in the agora but she is interrupted by a Moonling that passes her a note: she’s in danger. Isla pursues the Moonling delivery person and walks right into a trap of several Moonling nobles who are prepared to kill her. Luckily, Celeste followed her and frees Isla, together they kill the nobles and leave a message in blood for Cleo: try harder. Grim seeks Isla out after weeks of not seeing her. He asks if she wants to see him or be left alone, she says consistently that she wants to be left alone but she’s lying, and he probably knows it. He tells her that he should not see her, for the good of them both. She asks about what Oro said about Grim protecting them from something worse than the curse and Grim does not deny it, but doesn’t tell her more either, not wanting to distract her from the Centennial. So she asks him to take her to the Wild Isle instead, she wants to see it for herself. When they arrive, everything is dead as Oro had said, but there is a palace still standing. It’s called the Place of Mirrors. Isla goes in and sees something she recognizes. She goes back that night without Grim to investigate further, it’s a symbol that she recognizes as a hidden door, since there’s one in her chambers in the Newlands. But this one won’t open, it needs some sort of key that she cannot find. She asks Juniper for information. He doesn’t have any about a hidden room, but he does know that only Wildling power can be used within the Place of Mirrors. Interesting. On her way out of Juniper’s bar, Grim sees her again. They share a tension riddled rainstorm together and Isla realizes that maybe she judged the Wildlings that fell in love a little more harshly than she should have. It is eight days before Oro fetches Isla again. She and Celeste use this time to investigate the Sun Isle library, which they discover is heavily guarded and always full of people. No way they’re getting in unnoticed. When Oro calls for her, he reveals that it took several days to find the ancient being and then more to broker a deal, but he managed it. They go together to Star Isle, where they meet a specter. Something the king did not mention, the specter wants to possess the body of the most beautiful woman on the island for a few moments before she will help them. After some yelling, Oro agrees to take Isla to his library, Isla agrees to being possessed. She wakes up once the specter is out of her body, in Oro’s arms. The specter tells them that the heart is not on this isle. That the darkness below is awakening. As if they don’t have enough to deal with already. Isla wants to go to the library right then but Oro refuses to take her, she didn’t specify when they’d go when they made their deal. Instead, she waits three days and goes to the library by herself, not trying to hide who she is. Joke is on her, Oro already has someone waiting to lead her to the library and he’s closed it to the public all week, so she can be there alone. She quickly finds the secret spots where the relics are hidden but there is no bondbreaker. And that’s the last library they know of. Her plan with Celeste is a bust. The ball that indicates the halfway point of the Centennial is held; at midnight the rulers are allowed to kill each other as long as they are not paired. Isla shares a moment with Grim and he gifts her a necklace that will summon him if she touches it (he makes it invisible after she’s wearing it) before he disappears. He says he will be back at the ball before midnight. When Isla returns to the main ballroom, everything falls apart. Literally. As in, the island itself starts to fall apart. Oro is in great pain, but he is able to stop the ballroom floor from rupturing any further. Barely. Part of the palace is ruined, and the islanders are now afraid to leave their houses. Oro and Isla visit the next ancient creature, a blue bee man who lives in a hive of other blue bee people. He captures Isla (that was the plan) but when Oro comes in after her, bee man slices his throat. Not enough to kill Oro right away, but he will die soon. Blue bee man tells them that he doesn’t know where the heart is this time, but he has seen it before, and it always grows where the light and the dark meet. Isla is in a hurry to get Oro to water so he can heal his throat (healing is a Moonling power), but he passes out before they make it. She’s able to drag him the rest of the way, throwing his body in a shallow river and allowing the magic to do its thing while she keeps him from drowning. Before he’s completely healed, and before he’s awake, the sun is going to come up. If he’s caught in the sun, he will die as part of the Sunling curse. She drags him to a cave for safety. When he wakes around noon, he has some ideas. There are eight places on the island that would match the riddle – where light and dark meet. They have to wait in the cave until the sun goes down. Or Oro does, and Isla chooses to wait with him. They ask each other questions to pass the time, answering each question honestly. What’s life like where Isla is from (terrible), what’s his favorite place on the island, did she know Grim before the Centennial (no), has he ever been in love (no), is there a bondbreaker on the island (no), how long has he been able to gild (since he was a kid). He asks what her secret is, and she chooses not to answer instead of lie. She asks what his flair is, and he doesn’t answer. He says he will tell if she does, but still no. Then he offers her something more. If she tells him her secret, he will let her win the Centennial. He believes that the heart has some Sunling and Nightshade power stored in it and that the original offense mentioned in the prophecy is that someone used the heart to set the curses, used the Nightshade power in it specifically. He thinks the heart will free them from their curses and whoever finds it will receive great power. He doesn’t want that power; she can have it if she tells him her secret. She still says no. They search all the places they can easily access but find the heart at none of them. Oro believes it must be on Moon Isle. They go to a block of ice on Moon Isle where Isla sees three women frozen, Oracles. Oro unfreezes one of them and the Oracle tells them that she’s been warned not to speak to them (by whom?) but she’s intrigued, so she will talk anyway. The heart is on Moon Isle, closer than they think, but they must find it on their own. She warns Isla that she is surrounded by lies and liars, and that one of the rulers will die before the Centennial is over. Then she freezes again. Oro says there are three places on Moon Isle, but they don’t have time to check them that night. They will search the first spot tomorrow. In the morning, Isla uses her Starstick to look at Wildling, and it is dying. The land is dead and pulling the magic from the people themselves, killing them. There’s nothing she can do to help them, powerless as she is, and she realizes she does need to win the Centennial to save her realm. She finds Oro and tells him her secret, then leaves the room. That night he calls a meeting of all the rulers to share progress and tells the other rulers what he and Isla have been doing. He wants to change partners (choosing Cleo as his own) asking that they be able to search Moon Isle freely, and putting Isla with Grim. When Cleo questions his motives, Oro doesn’t hesitate to tell everyone that Isla has no powers. Before any of them can kill her, Grim grabs Isla’s hand and they disappear together. Turns out, he doesn’t just turn invisible like she was thinking his flair was. He can move to other places and he’s risking letting everyone else know he has this ability to protect her. He tells her that he already knew she had no power. Nightshades can read curses, so he knew she wasn’t affected, and he kept her secret for her. If anyone hurts her, or even attempts to, he will destroy them. She believes him. Grim helps Isla move into the Place of Mirrors, where the other magics cannot be wielded. Celeste knows where she is, as does Ella, who continues to bring Isla food and water. Celeste keeps looking for the bondbreaker. She comes one day and tells Isla to snap out of it, the game is not done yet! They have a month left! She can’t just hide on Wild Isle until the Centennial is done. Isla sends Ella to see Juniper, offering details about her biggest secret in exchange for his own. He responds few days later saying that he knows who cast the curses. When Isla and Celeste go to meet him, they only find his dead body in the empty agora, the words “hard enough?” scrawled in blood. Another message from Cleo. Isla goes on a run while hiding on Wild Isle and goes near the Mainland, where she sees Cleo skulking around. She decides that Celeste was right about Cleo killing Juniper and decides to follow Cleo onto Moon Isle. She watches Cleo move a bunch of ice to reveal a hole, just as Isla is discovered. Isla yells that she knows Cleo cast the curses and killed Juniper. Cleo retorts that Isla is a fool and doesn’t know what she thinks she does, trapping Isla in a giant block of ice before continuing down the hole. Isla can’t get out of the ice and can’t call for help; she eventually loses consciousness. Lucky for her, Oro finds her and rescues her. He takes her to his rooms and explains that there was a place on Moonling that he could not access without Cleo’s help. That’s why he needed to bring Cleo in and to partner with her. He couldn’t tell Isla his plan, she needed to genuinely react like she’d been betrayed. He told Isla’s secret because it made sense that he would want to be re-paired if he had discovered it, but also because Cleo thinks Starling should be the realm to go. While she was paired with Celeste, Cleo could not kill Celeste, but revealing Isla’s secret made Cleo rethink her choice of which ruler should be killed. Because Oro believes that Starling is essential. But now that Oro and Cleo have checked that location (the heart was not there), he and Isla can work together again to check the other two. By the way, he knew she had been lying to him. He knew every time she lied to him. It’s his flair, he can tell when someone is lying. They decide to work together again. But first: Carmel. Carmel is a twenty-four-hour carnival to mark the seventy-fifth day of the Centennial. Isla goes for part of the celebration, since the rulers are not allowed to miss a Centennial event. Isla accidentally gets drunk and when she makes it back to the palace, she is escorted back to her rooms by Oro. It turns out, he commanded the Sunling armies during the Sunling/Nightshade War and fought against Grim, who commanded the Nightshade. It’s why he hates Grim. Oro leaves to go to Carmel once the sun goes down and Isla is interrupted by a pounding at her door. It’s Ella. Celeste has been attacked! When Isla runs out of the palace, she finds Celeste floating, surrounded by a silver fog and thin string. Oro is also there when Isla arrives. This is an old enchantment that he hasn’t seen for a long time, one that should have killed her but was interrupted. A poison that Celeste must fight on her own. If they try to heal her with Moonling magic, it will only make the poison kill her faster. It could be weeks before she wakes up… if she wakes up at all. Isla calls to Grim and asks him to hide Celeste until she wakes up, afraid that whoever was interrupted will come back to finish the job. Isla goes back to Wild Isle, intent on opening the hidden door she’d found but gets absolutely nowhere before she must return to the palace to search for the heart with Oro. While looking in the next location, she almost gets killed by a dark mer creature, but they don’t find the heart. Which leaves one last location to search, in the center of Vinderland territory. The Vinderlands are Wildlings who had renounced their power and realm before the curses, and who already tried to kill Isla when she was trapped in ice. She and Oro will go the next night to the Vinderland territory, but they take a visit to the armory first. When they get to the Vinderland territory, there’s a fight and they kill a bunch of Vinderland cannibals. They search a giant ice tree but find nothing. They are out of places to look. They decide to go back to the beginning. Oro had read about the heart in a secret library, he takes Isla there and reads the passage to her. One thing she needs to know first, the island of Lightlark was created by his ancestor Horus Rey, Grim’s ancestor Cronan Malvere, and Isla’s ancestor, Lark Crown. Lark made the land itself; the island is named after her. Only one of their three realms can use the heart. Which means that Cleo did not cast the curse. It was either Sunling, Nightshade, or Wildling. Isla and Oro go through the book until they’re exhausted and decide to take a break. Isla goes to see Celeste who is still floating, hidden where only Grim and Isla know where she is. Isla grabs Celeste’s hand, and a blue diamond ring falls out. A blue diamond ring that Isla gave to Azul when they first met. Isla goes to the Place of Mirrors and pulls the pendant that Grim gave to her, he comes to her in a panic since he thinks she’s in danger. She asks him about Lark Crown. He confirms the story, telling her that he thought she should find out in her own time. She asks if he’s hiding anything else from her, he confirms that he is. Like how he thinks about her all the time. They get romantic and it feels familiar to Isla somehow. She notices a large scar on his chest. She and Oro continue looking for clues about where the heart is, and Isla wonders if it only blooms when light meets dark. In the place where they meet but only revealing itself when they meet: dusk and dawn. Suddenly, she believes she knows where the heart is. She goes with Oro to where she believes the heart will be and they wait in a cave so that he won’t be hurt when the sun rises. While they’re in the cave, Oro has painful tremors again as the island shakes and heaves, but she is able to help by singing to him. When the sun begins to rise, the island’s heart reveals itself as an egg. Isla grabs it, but just then the Vinderlands comes for revenge and shoots her through the chest. Oro kills the attackers but can’t get to her to heal her since the sun is out. She pulls her necklace and Grim shows up. Isla loses consciousness and she drops the heart. She wakes up with Grim at her side, back in her room in the palace. He doesn’t know how she lived but she did. He also tells her that he found an ancient Wildling elixir that was able to wake Celeste. Isla goes to Celeste, and Celeste confirms that it was Azul who attacked her. Isla tells Celeste everything that has happened since Celeste was poisoned and runs back to her room, not stopping even when Celeste calls to her. Oro brings Isla the heart, which he had retrieved after she dropped it, and asks her to meet him in the library. Once there, he tells her to pick the realm she will save. She chooses Starling, and he tells her that Nightshade has to go. He has Azul and Cleo backing him. Isla runs away from Oro with the heart, and she makes a plan. One that will save her realm, her friend, and Grim too. It involves the bondbreaker. Isla tells Celeste where the hidden library is and Celeste sneaks in to get the bondbreaker, they will meet afterward at the Place of Glass. Isla then calls Grim, and he teleports himself and Isla as close as he can. Once they get there, he reveals another secret. These dreams of hers, the ones involving the two of them, are actually memories. She had been visiting him using the starstick for a year. They’re in love, but he had to take her memories of him away before the Centennial started. That’s why he feels so familiar to her, and he’s been in love with her this whole time. She feels betrayed and runs to meet Celeste, they use the bondbreaker together. As it works its magic, Oro shows up to the Place of Glass as well, but neither he nor Grim can get to Isla. And she really has been betrayed! But not by either Oro or Grim! It’s not a bondbreaker but a bondmaker! Celeste isn’t Celeste at all, but Aurora, the ruler of Starling from the night the curses were cast, who should have died with the rest of them. She had been set to marry Oro’s brother Egan – Sunling’s previous ruler, but he fell in love with Violet Crown instead, Aurora’s best friend. Aurora/Celeste used her shape shifting flair to turn into a Wildling and approached Grim, convincing him to bring her the heart (he didn’t know what it was at the time). Aurora couldn’t use it the way she wanted since she is not Sunling, Wildling, or Nightshade, but she was able to curse everyone else. The curse did not touch her since she was the one who cast it. Then she used the heart to create an illusion where she killed herself like the other rulers, and she took the identity of her younger sister. She has ruled Starling this whole time, changing her identity every few years. She bided her time, having been told about the bondmaker by Egan. But you can only use it once and she wants the powers of all six realms, she had to wait for the circumstances to be exactly right. When people from two realms have a child, that child only has power from one realm… or so they think. But Celeste tells Isla that her father was a Nightshade general, and she actually has the power of both. The Nightshade powers were just shadowing the Wildling powers, making them invisible so that Isla thought she was powerless. But Isla let something slip to Grim one of the times she visited him with the starstick, and when he sought out Celeste, Grim recognized Celeste for who she really was. Celeste convinced him that she would not rest until Egan’s family line was wiped out, that the original transgression was really a Sunling falling in love with Wildling, that to break the curse Oro would need to fall in love with Isla. But that would never happen, because Isla and Grim were already in love and Isla wouldn’t allow it. So, Celeste convinced Grim to take Isla’s memories. It’s why he has stayed away from Isla, even encouraging her to befriend Oro. Then once Oro loved Isla, Aurora could kill Oro, they could break the curse and Grim would return Isla’s memories to her, and he and Isla could rule Lightlark together. But when a ruler falls in love with another ruler, they relinquish some of their power to the one they love. Oro, as King of Lightlark, has power from all the realms on Lightlark (Sun, Moon, Star, and Sky). And he is in love with Isla. So, when Celeste took Isla’s blood, she took the all the power that Isla, Grim, and Oro had. The power of all six realms. Isla has grown up believing that she did not have power, but that doesn’t mean she is powerless, and she won’t take this sitting down. She pulls out the starstick from where she keeps it against her back and portals to the Wildling Newland – off the island. The betrayal doesn’t stop with Celeste/Aurora. Celeste had called Isla a nickname only Poppy and Terra ever used, now Isla knows that the two of them are in on the plan somehow. When she gets to the Newland and sees Poppy, Poppy confirms her suspicions. She and Terra killed Isla’s parents to make Isla the ruler of Wildling in time for the Centennial, Celeste had threatened them. She would destroy all of Wildling herself if they did not comply with her demands. Isla doesn’t have time for retribution against Poppy or Terra, not yet. Instead, she dons her armor and arms herself with blades, then goes back to save the only person who has never lied to her: Oro. She portals back to fight Aurora using the starstick. Aurora now has the power of all six realms and no curse to keep her in check. Isla can’t let her leave the Place of Glass where most of her power is negated, even if killing her means Isla doesn’t make it out alive either. As Isla and Aurora fight, Grim gets Isla’s attention and reminds her of her heart. Her heart, which was pierced with an arrow and healed by Lightlark’s heart. Using the power within her heart, Isla calls the island’s heart to her. She is infused with its power, grabs the bondmaker, and pierces Aurora’s heart with it, pulling all the power from Aurora and killing her. This is the real first offense, the murder of a friend: Isla kills Celeste as Aurora killed Violet. The Starling line is now at an end and a ruler has won. As the curse breaks, so does Lightlark. A giant fissure cracks underneath Isla. She drops the heart into the center of Lightlark and she falls into the chasm after it. She now has all this power but doesn’t know how to use any of it, and neither Grim nor Oro can access their own power while in the Place of Mirrors. But she is caught by a vine, someone above her is using her own Wildling power, transferred to them by the love that Isla feels. Grim had tried and had not been able to help her because her love for him had been broken by his betrayal, Oro had saved her. Grim is furious, knowing that this means that Isla loves Oro, and he disappears into the night. Now that the curse is broken the storm that hides the island is dissipates. Cleo cuts down her bridge, separating her isle from the Mainland. Isla infuses the Wildling Newland with power to keep it alive before returning to her room on Lightlark. She now has the power of Starling as well, having taken it from Aurora with the bondmaker. In doing so, she saved the Starling realm though she killed Aurora. Grim retreats to Nightshade but speaks to Isla’s mind, imploring her to remember their time together. If she does, he knows that she will come back to him. Isla has not seen Oro since he brought her back to the palace… until now. She’s willing to give this thing between them a shot but she is no longer the reckless girl that she was with Grim. She goes back to the Place of Glass, which was mostly destroyed in the battle with Celeste, and uses her crown to finally open the secret door.