Havenfall

by Sara Holland

  It feels like a paltry plan to me, and I expect one or both of them to push back, but neither of them does. The Silver Prince rises to his full, imposing height and inclines his head in my direction. Graylin, for his part, gives me a small nod and a sad smile.

  “We’ll get to the bottom of this,” he says in the Silver Prince’s direction. “I swear it. We’ll run the summit until Marcus wakes up, and the other delegates and staff don’t need to learn what’s happened here tonight.”

  The Prince turns and gives him a long look, but still nods. “Very well. As long as Madeline is the one making decisions if Marcus is unable, leading Havenfall.”

  All the air seems to vacate itself from my chest. I understand why the inn needs a neutral leader, but when the Silver Prince puts it that way—

  Lead Havenfall. My mind races, circling around the words. Just for tonight, but still. It’s almost more than I can process.

  “Whatever we do,” the Silver Prince says after a few stretching moments, “we must begin now.”

  Graylin says tersely, “I agree,” and then glances at me. Waiting, I realize, for me to weigh in.

  “Sounds good,” I say. “I mean, yes. Start now. Let’s do it.”

  Ugh. Whatever a leader of Havenfall sounds like, it isn’t that.

  “I have to attend to my people,” the Prince says, gliding toward the door. He glances toward Marcus with a strange expression on his face. It’s worry, sort of, but not for my uncle—for what his condition means for the Prince. For Byrnisians. For Havenfall.

  Then he’s gone.

  It crosses my mind to worry about him, alone in the tunnels with more Solarians potentially on the loose. But that’s silly; I have the feeling he’ll be protecting us, not the other way around. I push off the desk and turn to look down at Marcus again, avoiding looking at the Solarian and its blood. We’ll have to do something about that, but first—“Should we take him to the hospital?” I ask, indicating my uncle. My voice breaks.

  Graylin’s dark skin has gone sallow. He shakes his head a little. “I healed all his physical injuries. The rest is magically inflicted. The humans won’t be able to do anything.”

  Helplessness seeps through my chest. I nod, trying not to let my lip tremble, but I can’t stop it. The bravado I found when the Silver Prince was in the room has deserted me now that it’s just us.

  Graylin notices, his eyes snapping up to me, and his brow smooths out. “Oh, Maddie,” he murmurs, stepping forward to wrap me in a much-needed embrace.

  “It’ll be all right,” he says into my hair. “Think of it as practice for when you inherit Havenfall for real someday.”

  Tears slip free and crawl down my cheeks. I know I shouldn’t be worrying about myself at all right now, not when there could be Solarians on the grounds. But to be told to lead the inn at such a moment—I feel so small, so childish and unprepared. I expect to feel like this in Sterling, but not at Havenfall. Never at Havenfall.

  “What if Marcus doesn’t wake up?” I say through a sniffle.

  “He will,” Graylin says firmly. “But in the meantime, he’d want you to be in charge. You don’t have to be perfect, Maddie, but you’re ready.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I whisper, smiling to try to trick myself into bravery. Because it seems like I don’t have much of a choice. Even so, I appreciate Graylin’s belief in me.

  He loops his arms beneath Marcus’s shoulders and knees and lifts him up, and I feel myself flinch. Even though Graylin is strong and gentle, it’s still unsettling to see Marcus carried like a corpse, his head tipping back, slivers of his blue irises showing through his lashes. A memory flashes through me of Marcus spinning me around by my hands in the ballroom when I was a little kid, making me feel weightless. Even through what happened to Nate and Mom, Marcus always seemed invulnerable to me, the happy king of this little kingdom. He’s my only family on Mom’s side, not counting her. I can’t lose Marcus. I can’t.

  “Wait here until I get him settled, will you?” Graylin says. “Then I can take you back upstairs.”

  “What about …” I glance without meaning to toward the Solarian corpse, wrapped in the carpet.

  Graylin’s smile, already weak, flickers out. “I’ll come back later and bury it.”

  I wonder if we’ll ever get the blue bloodstains out of the rug. A short laugh escapes me, because it’s such a trivial thing to worry about, and yet in my exhaustion it seems important. Marcus will come out of this soon, and I want him to see that I’ve kept this place shipshape in his absence.

  We need to get rid of the body.

  And I don’t want to be in the tunnels alone.

  “Let me help,” I tell Graylin. “Please.”

  I walk a little ahead of Graylin on the way back to their suite, in case I need to head off any delegates out for a late-night stroll—we can’t let anyone see Marcus like this. But the first person we pass in the hall is Willow as she brings a handful of security staff down the hall toward the Solarian doorway. She stares worriedly at Marcus but doesn’t stop to chat.

  I know that the team trailing her—the security team—is part of Havenfall’s staff, but I almost never see them. They’re stationed out in the woods usually, and the sight of them all gathered together makes everything feel even more dire somehow. These aren’t the dissolute college kids I saw in the common room earlier. They’re muscled, silent men and women, dressed in black with pistols at their hips. But, I worry they might not be enough.

  Eventually Graylin and I get Marcus to their room and settled into bed. He’s still out cold, and Graylin takes a moment to hit him with another round of healing magic, though I can tell Graylin’s tiring. When we step back out into the second-floor corridor, Graylin locks the bedroom door behind him, and I don’t know, I don’t ask, if it’s to keep threats out or Marcus in.

  Because now we have to deal with the body.

  With Graylin at my side, his head on a swivel for anything amiss, I go upstairs to a supply closet where Marcus stashes all the random crap that delegates and staff forget here every summer. It doesn’t take long to find what I’m looking for: a giant, smelly duffel bag that seems to be meant for ski equipment of some kind. I send a silent apology to whoever it belongs to as I roll it up and tuck it under my arm.

  Outside, the night—almost dawn now—is beautiful as usual for Havenfall. The air is pleasantly warm with just a touch of a cool breeze, the sky is spattered with stars, and a bouquet of night scents float on the wind—fresh water, pine, soil, and stone. The songs of crickets and frogs fill the air, blending with the soft rustling of pines. But it seems darker than usual, the shadows misshapen and looming. Every twig that snaps beneath our feet makes me jump and hold the shovel tighter, my heart hammering so hard it hurts. Little moonlight makes it through the trees, and Graylin is just a dark shape ahead of me, the bulging duffel bag slung over his shoulder distorting his silhouette. I don’t want the Solarian’s body anywhere near the inn, but still, every step we take away from the lights of Havenfall’s windows seems weighted with more and more danger.

  I don’t do much of the actual burial—mostly just standing nearby to make sure we’re alone while Graylin digs the hole, then helping him fill in the pit—but it’s still an ugly, brutal business. The sound of shovel hitting dirt, and then dirt hitting flesh, makes me flinch and my stomach roil. Suddenly, as I go to drop a blade full of dirt into the blackness, my stomach heaves and the shovel falls from my fingers.

  I feel like I’m going to throw up, and I don’t want to do it in front of Graylin. He’s dealing with enough right now; he doesn’t need to worry any more on my behalf.

  “Be right back,” I choke out, and dash away, instinct carrying me the way we came, toward the inn. I hear Graylin hiss out my name behind me, but I don’t stop. It’s like my body has a mind of its own and has determined to steer me back to the safe familiarity of the inn, away from blood and dirt and shovels and blue fur.

  The lighted squares
of Havenfall’s windows come into view through the trees—the delegates on the upper floors are asleep, but the first floor lights are always lit—and relief fills my chest, even though I know it’s not really safe, not when the Solarian door is open. I’m exhausted and scared and angry and sad, and all I want to do is fall into bed. I can figure out what to do next in the morning—

  Then something moves in the shadows of the garden.

  I freeze, feet skidding to a halt, my breath vanishing in my lungs so I can’t even shout for Graylin. I’m in the middle of the lawn, halfway between the trees and the inn, totally exposed if another soul-hungry Solarian has slipped free of its world—

  But then the creature in the garden moves again and I see it’s not a Solarian, but a person, stone still on the little footpath between the rosebushes. Blond hair, leather jacket, big eyes. Taya. The girl who almost hit me with her motorcycle.

  “Maddie?” she calls softly, voice rising just above the frogs and the crickets. “Are you okay?”

  I’m still frozen. Before I can tell her to stay back, tell her anything at all, she’s out of the garden, crossing the lawn toward me.

  I want to shrink away from the moonlight, conscious of the blood and the dirt on my clothes, but there’s nowhere to go. I cross my arms over my chest, aware that I’m still in my now-ragged party finery. “What are you doing out here?” I ask.

  Her brow furrows. “I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d take a walk. What about you?”

  “Same,” I say, not knowing what else to say, even though that excuse doesn’t hold water considering my clothes.

  One of Taya’s eyebrows arches. “Sure, okay.” She looks me up and down, her confused face breaking into a smile, then looks around me with an exaggerated motion. “So are these woods the hot make-out spot, then? Should I expect more company here?”

  “What? No!” My voice comes out too loud, confused and angry, before I realize that is the most logical explanation for me being outside like this. But that just makes me think of Brekken and brings all the feelings of fear and betrayal rushing back. I step back from Taya and take a deep breath, trying to gather myself.

  She eyes me warily. “Hey, no judgment,” she says. “It’s your life. There’s a lot of pretty people here, even if there is something weird about this place.”

  My stomach drops. Of course, Taya got here late. Willow probably hasn’t had a chance to give her the rundown on Havenfall and the Adjacent Realms. It’s not only the Solarian I need to keep secret from her, it’s everything.

  “There are a lot of pretty people here,” I agree, trying to keep it light. “But keep the making out inside, okay? At least at night. There’s been … Some people have seen a mountain lion around.”

  One corner of Taya’s mouth crooks upward. I can’t tell if she believes me or not. “If you say so,” she says slowly. “Not that it matters, anyway. I have a rule—no girls for me this summer, not until I figure out some life stuff.”

  “Oh?” I blink, forgetting for a second about haylofts and Solarians and shadows. “What does one have to do with the other?”

  She flashes a smile, teeth white in the dark. “I have important things to do. And girls are so distracting, don’t you think?”

  “Everyone is distracting,” I say, thinking of Brekken, then belatedly realize how that sounds. Even if it’s pretty much true.

  Taya laughs, and a laugh bubbles up out of me, an alien feeling after all the crying I’ve been doing tonight. I wonder what important things she has to do. I realize I’ve uncrossed my arms, they’re hanging loose at my sides, and I hurriedly cross them again, hoping she hasn’t seen the blood. At least it’s blue, not red.

  Remembering the blood, the stickiness and grime on my skin, the momentary lift in my mood deflates and dread seeps back in. How can I even think about laughing at a time like this? Graylin is still in the trees, probably waiting by the graveside for me to come back. Suddenly I feel small and ashamed, like I did at Nate’s funeral when the pastor started talking about innocent lambs brought back to the fold and I laughed out loud, because Nate would have been horrified to be compared to something so boring. How everyone looked at me, aghast and pitying.

  “Do me a favor?” I say to Taya. “Go in for the night. Save your walks for the daytime until we have this … mountain lion situation sorted out.”

  Her smile fades. She shrugs and turns around, then looks back over her shoulder. “Aren’t you coming in too?”

  I shift from foot to foot. “In a second. Go on. I’m right behind you.”

  She knows I’m lying. I can tell. The guardedness comes back into her face. She nods once, her eyes narrowing, then looks away and strides back toward the inn doors.

  I watch her go for a few moments, then turn back toward the trees. Exhaustion is closing in on me, making my limbs heavy and making it hard to focus on anything but one foot in front of the other, the next step. Clean up. Lock the doors. I can’t think any further ahead than that before things get vague and overwhelming.

  Fix this.

  8

  In movies, there’s that thing when the main character wakes up the night after a disaster, and they have a moment of peace and not-remembering before everything crashes back in.

  Not for me. Even before the events of last night come back to me, everything feels wrong, like a heavy, sticky gray gauze muffling everything. I woke up to my chirping phone alarm with a scream in my throat the shape of my brother’s name. I’m frozen, my limbs pinned to my side and my jaw wired shut by some invisible force. Seconds crawl past, the alarm blaring louder and louder until it matches the scream in my head, until finally something breaks and I can grab my phone and hit snooze.

  I drag myself out of bed, blood and grave-dirt still clinging to my skin.

  When I finally stumbled back into my room just before dawn, I was too exhausted to do anything but strip off my filthy clothes and fall into bed. Now I regret it. Some of the Solarian blood has gotten on me, and it dries black and sticky, like tar. It clots my hair, stains my pillowcase.

  I spend too long in the shower—not even caring about the ice-cold water; I want to scrub every trace of last night from my body. I must have only slept for a couple of hours. Exhaustion still weighs down my sore limbs and makes my head fuzzy. But I’m weirdly glad for it. It makes it easy to think simple thoughts.

  After everything happened, after I first moved in with Dad and I couldn’t eat or sleep or do anything at all for the crushing grief, Dad had a motto. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. I didn’t understand it at first, but it sank in a little every day, when Dad would coach me through the simplest tasks, cheer when I managed to do the littlest things—eat half a bowl of mac and cheese, brush my hair. I started thinking of the grief, the memories, as a huge shadowy elephant that stalked me through the day and sat on my chest at night. Whenever Dad said that, one bite at a time, I snapped my teeth at the imaginary elephant, imagining that I had fangs that could tear through smoke and shadow.

  Now I know to think simple thoughts. I need to focus on one thing at a time. Otherwise everything that’s happened will crash back down and crush me.

  So: wash my hair once, twice, three times, scrubbing the short strands with a vengeance. Get out and return in a bathrobe to my room to assess the damage. Strip the sheets off the bed and cram them into the laundry basket. Take the book of poems Brekken gave me and shove it deep into the back of my closet, in the secret compartment I found years ago behind a loose wall panel, where I won’t have to look at it. Still, I can’t help but be gentle with the book, brushing the floor clear of dust before laying it down.

  That done, I pick yesterday’s outfit off the floor and lay it out, my favorite velvet riding pants and the beautiful Byrnisian jacket with scale sleeves. They’re ruined now. Not because of the wine, dirt, and bloodstains—even though those are extensive—but because I’ll never be able to put them on again without remembering too many things. The way Brekken’s eyes l
it up when he saw me across the ballroom last night. The way he ran his hands carefully up the sleeves. I was so sure it was want I saw in his eyes. But want for what?

  How is it only twelve hours ago I was walking down the stairs to the celebration, grinning for the joy just of being in Havenfall?

  I shake my head hard, as if that will break the chain of impossible thoughts quickly spooling out. I have to figure out something to ward off any questions from the laundry team. Looking around the room, I zero in on my desk, the pens scattered on top. I grab a Bic, hold it over the pile of clothes, and snap the pen in two. Black ink flies over the sheets, the clothes, my hands. Carefully, I stick the broken pieces into the jacket breast pocket and then go to wash my hands. Hopefully, the pen’s presence will explain away the dark stains of Solarian blood. I pull on leggings and a hoodie and go down to the Innkeeper’s suite, feeling like a zombie.

  Most people are still asleep, will be till breakfast, but I run into a few guests out and about. I hurry past them, head down. I’m pretty useless before coffee on my best days. But on the last flight of stairs, someone grabs my shoulder. Nessa, the Fiorden noblewoman I spoke to last night, dressed for a day of peacemaking in a sharp-cut silk suit.

  “Madeline,” she says, eyes drilling into mine. “What was that commotion last night?”

  I tug out of her grip, the worry in her voice bringing back the fear, the screams. “We’ll explain everything at breakfast,” I say, stalling, hoping that’ll put her off, and escape down the stairs before she can ask anything else.

  When I knock on the door to Marcus’s suite, Willow is the one who answers. She’s more composed than she was last night, in a crisp blue blouse, her hair tied up with gold pins. But she still looks pale and drawn, with shadows under her eyes. She smiles when she sees me, but it’s small and lacks her usual warmth. She ushers me into the living room and closes the door.