by Sara Holland
“Don’t question it, or I might change my mind.” Taya grins and claps my shoulder before leaning back with her hands on the desktop, tipping her head up to consider the oak-beam ceiling. “There’s something strange about this place. I can feel it. And …” She looks down at me for a second, then up again, cheeks stained pink. “My brother always told me there were other worlds out there. That maybe we were a prince and princess of one of them, and someday we would find our way back. I shouldn’t remember that. I was just a toddler, but I do.” Then her smile dims. “Unless I just made it all up. That’s also a possibility.”
“No.” The word comes out with a force that surprises me. Maybe because the way she talks about Terran is like putting a stethoscope to my own chest and hearing my thoughts about Nate. “Just because you were little doesn’t mean the memories aren’t real.” Mine are real.
“You asked about my big life goals,” Taya says. “I want to find him.” She lets out a shaky laugh. “It sounds stupid out loud.”
“Not stupid at all.” Sympathetic pain shoots through my chest. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose a brother because of a government system, not because of a monster like I did. To know every day that he might be out there somewhere, and never know for sure. “I could help you.”
I don’t know why I say it. I never decided to say it. The words just come out. But I find that I can’t take them back either. I just sit there like an idiot, looking up at her, still half-sure that she’s going to laugh in my face any second.
She tilts her head, and it’s hard to read her face. “Why would you do that?”
“Because I lost a brother too. I’d give anything to have him back.” More word-vomit.
What is it about Taya that makes me lose it like this? I’ve always prided myself on my ability to keep my mouth shut. I never told anyone about Havenfall, except my dad, even though—or maybe because—I knew he wouldn’t believe me. I’ve never talked about Nate because I could never share the whole truth, and lying always made it worse, not better. And now here I am, spilling my guts to someone who I met only a little over a day ago, practically a stranger.
Her face has softened. “I’m sorry. Is he—”
“Dead, yeah. Nate died.”
I say the words fast like that’ll make it easier, but it doesn’t, nothing does. The tears are threatening again. Hastily, I grope to change the subject. I point to the papers.
“Help me get to the bottom of this, and once my uncle gets better I’ll do whatever I can to help you find your brother. Terran?”
“Terran,” she confirms. Her eyes on mine are thoughtful and so dark, almost black.
“Deal.”
She leans forward and shakes my hand in a soft, warm grip, and then leans back, blowing out a breath like she’s exhausted. “Whew. This summer is already heavier than I signed up for.”
“What did you sign up for?” I ask, half-curious.
She hitches one shoulder in a shrug. “The usual. You know. Kill some time, forget about my ex-girlfriend, make some money so I can find my brother.”
“Are you in college somewhere?” I ask, remembering that she’s nineteen.
A guarded look flits over her face. It’s there and then gone. “No. The making money thing has to come first.” Her tone doesn’t invite any further questions. “What about you?” she asks.
Even though there’s a hint of a sparring tone to her words, I feel a smile spread over my face as I think about my master plan. “Yeah. I want to take classes online and live here.”
“And what then?”
I shrug. It’s become a habit to talk about Havenfall to outsiders in a deliberately casual way—letting anyone see how deep my need for this place goes is exposing a wound in my soul. People my age want money, a car, a college acceptance letter, a boyfriend or girlfriend. Normal things. All I want in the world is for Havenfall to be my home.
“Who knows?” I say lightly. “Maybe I’ll take this place over someday.”
Taya’s gaze holds mine, and I have the uncanny feeling she sees through my blasé façade.
But all she says is, “Sounds like a good plan.”
The next morning when I wake up, I feel just as exhausted as ever, having scarcely slept at all. Nightmares kept me tossing and turning all night, and though I can’t remember them, I can guess well enough what they were about. Open doorways, tunnels hiding monsters.
Still, I drag myself out of bed, into my least wrinkled clothes—a short, long-sleeved gray dress over black leggings—and stumble downstairs to Marcus and Graylin’s suite.
Just like yesterday, Willow lets me in. Just like yesterday, Marcus is unconscious on the bed. Graylin sits in a chair beside him, magic glittering between his hands.
“Marcus looks a little better,” I say, too brightly, but it’s true. Some of the color has returned to my uncle’s face, and the rise and fall of his chest is deeper and steadier than it was yesterday.
“If you say so,” Graylin mutters, not looking at me. He looks even worse than I feel. There is a sallow undertone to his skin and bags under his eyes.
Willow, circling back to me with a cup of coffee from the Keurig on the dresser, leans in and whispers in my ear. “Graylin hasn’t slept at all. I tried to get him to take a break, but maybe you’ll have better luck.”
I nod my understanding and step forward cautiously. “Graylin …”
He shakes his head, still not meeting my eyes. “I know what you’re going to ask. Answer’s still no. He’s been out too long. I’m here until he wakes up.”
“Graylin.” My stomach twists. Fiordens can go for longer than humans without sleep, but not indefinitely. “He would want you to get some rest.”
At that, Graylin finally looks up. His expression is awful, hollowed out and heartsick and somehow—guilty. Does he feel to blame for what happened? Don’t, I want to tell him. If this was anyone’s fault, it was mine. Mine, for letting Brekken trick me. I still don’t understand what he and the Heiress have to do with the door to Solaria opening, but it can’t be a coincidence that it all happened on the same night.
Before I can put my thoughts into words, a knock at the door makes all three of us jump. I’m the closest, so I shrug and go to the door, but I can’t help but hold my mug tighter. As if a monster like the one who killed my brother would knock. As if a face full of coffee would stop it.
But it’s just a girl, one of the Boulder college kids on staff. Kimmy, I think her name is. She looks worried.
“Hi, sorry, is Marcus around?”
The bed is around a corner, but I still position my body so she can’t see deeper into the room. “Not right now, but what’s up? I might be able to help.”
Please let this be something normal and silly. A clogged toilet or bickering delegates or wine spilled on white carpet …
“Jayden found a dead deer in the woods.” Kimmy chews her lip. “We went out there last night to, um …” She trails off, reddening.
“Never mind about that.” I don’t mean to snap at her, but worry pushes the words out fast and sharp. “As long as you didn’t go out of the grounds, that’s fine. But what happened to the deer?”
“It looks like a mountain lion got it. It was half-eaten.” She shudders. “But there were these weird footprints around it. Like …” She holds her hand out palm up, fingers stretched out. “They were huge, and had claws, but something like thumbs too. Been a long time since I was a Girl Scout, but I don’t think mountain lions have thumbs.”
My skin tightens. “Yeah, no.” Okay, Maddie, I tell myself. Stay calm. This doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it means.
“A bear, maybe?” I hear myself say. “They have five toes.” I fight an insane urge to laugh.
Kimmy scrunches her eyebrows. “Maybe …”
I can tell she doesn’t believe it any more than I do.
“I’ll send people to check it out,” I tell her. “In the meantime, maybe hold off on the wandering alone in
the woods.”
Kimmy nods.
“And tell the others too—stay inside, if you can.”
Once Kimmy leaves, I turn back into the apartment. Graylin’s and Willow’s dark expressions echo the feeling in my chest. The tight, churning fear. That we didn’t try hard enough to close the Solarian door. Because now, even though we put guards in the tunnels, something else has gotten through.
“I’m going down to the tunnel to check on things,” I say. “If I’m not back in half an hour, call the cops.”
It’s a bad joke, and neither of them laughs. Willow rises to her feet, and Graylin a second later.
“Marcus will be fine without us for a few minutes,” he says to my questioning look. “You’re not going down there alone.”
Sal and six guards—a different team from yesterday; Sal has them rotating out to keep eyes in the tunnel 24/7—meet us at the juncture and accompany us down to the Solarian tunnel. None of them saw anything unusual, and though none of us say it, I wonder if the others are thinking, as I am, about the Solarians’ ability to shapeshift. How far does it go—could a Solarian disguise itself as a rat, a moth, a speck of dust? How can we guard against a threat when we don’t know what form it will take?
The only sound in the tunnel, besides our footsteps and breathing, is the usual muted howl of wind through the stone labyrinth—the icy whistle of Fiordenkill’s arctic breeze, and the hot, wild roar of Byrn’s tempestuous gales. None of us says anything. We just walk faster into the darkness—Graylin and Willow first, side by side, then me, the guards flanking us.
When we round the corner, there’s nothing but air and darkness. The crack in the Solarian door is wider still, and a terrifying orange light shows through. I think I can hear howling on the other side—whether it’s the howling of wind or beasts, I can’t tell.
And—goose bumps break out all over me as I see it—there are more scratch marks than before. The long, pale, curved slashes look like wounds in the stone.
My eyes follow the slashes around the crack in the door. Into the hallway. Fading just before they reach my feet. There’s no mistaking the implications this time.
A Solarian beast is in Havenfall.
11
That evening, I’m crouched in front of the fireplace in the reception room, trying to focus on taking deep breaths. The distant strains of the Elemental Orchestra float through the halls from the ballroom, but the music is nearly drowned out by the clatter of hail on the skylight, so heavy and loud that I’m sure at any moment the glass will break and rain down on me.
After what we saw in the tunnels this morning, I spoke to the Silver Prince and Princess Enetta, letting them know that there was almost certainly a Solarian somewhere on the grounds and that we had to keep everyone inside. The Silver Prince offered Byrnisian magic to buy me time. The storm he spun has been raging all day, rattling the windows and making the light dim and dull. Now it’s dark, but the storm is slow to fade. My heart stutters every time lightning lines the windows in red, or thunder sounds in the distance. It’s the first time I’ve been alone all day, and the dread that I’ve managed to push down through today’s meetings is fighting its way back up. Making my pulse race and my ribs feel too tight, like my heart and lungs are fighting for space inside me. Sweat drips down my back, but I still feel cold, even holding my hands close to the flames. Tendrils of panic have worked their way into the edges of my mind and they’re pulling, pulling, pulling.
There’s a Solarian somewhere near. It could be literally anywhere.
No. I can’t go there. Graylin told me after the tunnels that their shapeshifting ability only goes so far. That from what he can tell from the history, most Solarians can only cycle between two or three forms that manifest over their lifetime. They can’t take one glance at a person and mimic their appearance, or shrink themselves down to nothing. We’ll know it when we see it. I don’t need to be afraid of Kimmy hurrying by in the hall, silver meal tray in her hands; or the moth I can see on the glass of the west window, seemingly unbothered by the rain, slowly beating its wings.
But I still am.
Every time I close my eyes, I’m back in Mom’s kitchen cupboard, boxes and tins and cans pressing against my back and legs, hearing Mom scream and Nate scream and smelling hot copper blood through the crack in the door. I can’t see anything, just flashes of color and movement, blue fur, red blood …
Focus, Maddie. I don’t have time to wallow in horrible memories, even if I wanted to. I reach for a happy one instead, something Dad told me to do in those early months afterward, when nightmares still woke me up screaming almost every night. You have more happy memories than scary ones, don’t you? Why give the scary ones so much space in your head?
It’s hard to think about the time before the attack, because there’s always an undercurrent of fear in the memories now—like I should have known such happiness couldn’t last. But I think about walking to the bus stop at the end of the street, clutching Mom’s right hand while Nate holds her left, cotton puffs swirling down all around us like summer snow. I think of the dinosaur costume she made me for Halloween and how big and brave I felt with claws and the tail that swung behind me. I think about lying underneath the Christmas tree with Nate, peering through the string lights woven through the branches that looked like a red-and-green galaxy.
When my head feels clearer, I let out a slow breath.
I need to be stronger than this. There’s a monster somewhere on the grounds of Havenfall and a hundred people around me who are counting on me to keep them safe. Even if they don’t exactly know it yet.
Footsteps sound outside, and I straighten up as the door to the hall opens and Graylin, Willow, Sal, the Silver Prince, and Enetta all file in. Graylin is holding what looks like a bolt of dark leather. The lines of his face seem more deeply drawn than ever before, and I feel a twist of sorrow. Graylin loves poetry and music and Marcus. He shouldn’t be holding what I know he’s holding. But his jaw is set as he deposits the bundle on the nearest coffee table and carefully unrolls it, the contents gleaming in the low light.
He’s brought a collection of weapons from the old armory room on the second floor, weapons that my whole life up till now have just been for show—more a museum exhibit than anything, but not anymore. Willow and I each receive a curved, slender short sword; Graylin and Enetta both get belt holsters with gold-filigreed Fiorden revolvers—light and elegant, rain- and snow-proof and fitted with capsules of poison instead of bullets.
Brekken and I used to play-fight in the woods as kids, pretending to be Fiorden soldiers, sparring with wooden swords or firing BB guns at empty pop cans balanced on tree stumps. Hoisting a weapon feels different now—it’s heavy, slippery in my sweating hands as we make our way down into the tunnels. Tomorrow we’ll go out to try to find the monster; tonight we’ll try again to seal the door so no more can escape. Byrnisian magic didn’t work, but maybe Fiorden magic will. They can heal flesh—maybe they can heal whatever’s amiss with the doorway too.
It’s hard to tell if anything about the doorway has changed since yesterday. The orange light is still there; shadows still flicker and shift on the other side. This time it’s Graylin who steps up, along with Enetta, and they stand with their eyes half-closed and their hands against the stone. They’re very still, but I can almost feel the slow pull of their magic, the current. Graylin told me once he could feel the movement of water beneath the earth if he looked for it, the same way I can touch someone’s throat or wrists and find a pulse. He said the mountains were living things just like him or me, different but no less alive. I wonder what the mountains are telling him now.
After a few minutes of silence—well, silence except for the ominous hum from the other side of the door—Enetta moves. She takes a small knife from her sleeve and makes a shallow cut along the back of her arm, then touches her fingers to it and dabs blood on the wall.
“Um.” My voice quavers. Blood makes me queasy, and even though it’s onl
y a little—and almost invisible in this dark tunnel anyway—my body reacts, a shudder gripping me for a moment. “What are you guys doing?”
Graylin starts to say something, but Enetta cuts him off, irritable and urgent. “Now.”
They start speaking in low, unified voices, too quiet for me to make out the words of a language I don’t recognize. The Silver Prince shifts his feet, drifting closer to the wall and closer to me, and I feel the heat of him in the cold tunnel.
Then a kind of charge seems to pass through the air, ghosting over my skin, and the shadows behind the door stir more than usual, waving like seaweed in a tide pool. But after a moment, they lie relatively quiescent again. Graylin turns and Enetta steps back, a hard frown on her face. Whatever they tried, clearly it didn’t work.
“I don’t like this,” Enetta says coldly. She keeps her eyes on the Solarian doorway, drumming bloody fingers on the wall in thought. “I did not bring my people here to put them at risk. If Havenfall has ceased to be safe, the Fiorden delegation will return to Myr forthwith.”
My stomach drops. “Didn’t you feel anything?”
If the Fiorden delegation leaves now, days after the solstice, it could disrupt the balance of the doorways. And worse, almost, is the thought of the summit ending early. A centuries-long peace ending because I couldn’t keep things together for a few days in Marcus’s absence.
“There was a ripple,” Graylin says, stepping away and rubbing his forehead. “But the doorway didn’t respond to our blood.”
An idea hits me, and my mouth goes dry, but my words are already spilling out, a surfeit of fear whittling down my ability to think first, talk second. “Try it with my blood.”
Graylin’s head shoots up, his eyes shockingly hard. “No,” he says.
I feel, rather than see, the Silver Prince move. Step closer.
“It might work, Graylin,” he says, uncharacteristically gentle. “I don’t pretend to be an expert on your magic, but if whose blood matters …” He glances sidelong at me. “It’s a good idea. Maybe the Innkeeper’s blood will accomplish something.”