by Sara Holland
And besides—it wasn’t a Solarian who gave the order to kill me.
I stare at the twin images of Havenfall before me, the real thing and the one reflected in Mirror Lake. Taya’s plea from yesterday echoes in my mind.
Leave right now, with me.
But even though everything is so terribly wrong, the inn still calls to me. Omphalos. Where else would I ever go?
A Byrnisian delegate, a woman named Kel, is standing guard at the front door when I trudge out of the woods. She’s traded in her delegate fashion, though, for military dress, wearing breastplates made of overlapping, gleaming red scales over a loose black tunic and leggings. Her hand goes to her sword hilt when I come out of the trees; then I see her recognize me and do a double take.
“Innkeeper?” she says incredulously.
I can’t stop the laugh that bubbles up, scraping my throat painfully on the way out, my vocal cords still raw from my near-death experience. The title feels so false now that I’ve broken a hundred years of tradition and allied with the Silver Prince. And by the looks of it, he’s already flexing his new authority. I think about the man in the antique shop again; I commit his features to memory. What will it mean if the Silver Prince knows him? If he doesn’t?
All I want to do is take a long, hot shower and then sleep for a week. Or sit down with Graylin and Willow, spill everything, and let them tell me what to do next. But I’m not a little kid anymore, and these problems won’t go away by dumping them on the grown-ups to fix. This is on me.
As I run, drenched and shaking, up the stairs, the only thing I can think is: this is royally messed up. Twisted beyond all reason.
When I open my door, the room beyond is dark and still, just as I left it. But no—something is off. A presence, a movement in the darkness, like a cold wind over my skin. I thought I was all out of fear, but it roars back up, I’m plummeting again. I grab blindly for the light switch but it’s too late. A hand closes around my mouth, stifling a scream.
The door slams behind me and suddenly, my back is against the wall, and I’m staring into a familiar set of eyes.
Brekken.
22
The world seems to go absolutely still. Like my heart has stopped beating, my nerves stopped firing. Brekken looks sharper than when I last saw him, harsher. Like the intervening days have carved away at him, leaving his cheeks hollow, his eyes burning. His clothes are dirt-stained, his hair damp, color high in his cheeks.
“What have you done, Maddie?” he whispers, toneless. His hands are on my arms, not tight, but tense, like I might fight him off. Should I fight him off? I stare at him, unable to reconcile the clash of feelings rushing up in me.
On the one hand, there’s the fear, the anger—he lied to me. I was so wrong to trust him. And yet relief and joy are welling up too. He’s safe, he’s here. I blink hard, swallowing, trying desperately to catch up with the current moment. “You came back.”
“Because you broke off the alliance.” There’s anguish in his voice, and anger too, simmering beneath the surface. He smells like ice. Instinct tells me to defend myself, explain. That’s what the Maddie of a week ago would have done. But instead I step away, outrage prickling along my skin. “A lot has happened since you left. What have you even been doing?”
He takes a breath, but then, as I back away and light from the setting sun hits me, his eyes go wide. They travel over me, and whatever he was going to say seems to dissipate as he takes in my wet clothes, the bruises. “Maddie, what happened?” he chokes out after a moment.
My voice comes out too loud and on the edge of cracking. “Someone tried to kill me.”
The rage that ripples through his clenched muscles, the fierce flash of his eyes, is enough to burn a hole through the door behind me. “Who? Are they at Havenfall?”
I take a deep breath. “This asshole named Whit. And no.” But, a small voice in my head whispers. What about the Byrnisian man who gave the order to kill me? What’s his deal, who is he working for?
Brekken swipes his hair back from his face, letting out a pained breath. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. You’re right, I don’t know what’s happened. But we’ll fix it.” He steps forward, his hand coming up to gently cup my cheek. I stare up at him, frozen with confusion and doubt, but wanting nothing more than to lean into his touch.
Then something barely perceptible feathers my skin. The touch of something invisible, soft and warm and lighter than air. It spreads up from my lips, over my face, through my hair. And when it lifts, the pain in my head—the heavy pounding from hitting the cellar wall, the car trunk floor, the surface of Mirror Lake—it’s all gone at once.
Technically, Brekken’s my enemy now, I realize. But with the healing magic, a feeling of being loved and cared for crashes into me with the impact of a semitruck. No matter what’s happened, where he’s been, I know Brekken loves me. And even though I’m still angry and confused, still full of a thousand questions, a strangled gasp escapes me, and I’m moving forward without deciding to, launching myself into his arms.
I didn’t realize just how hard I missed him, or how much I really thought I’d never see him again, even if I didn’t let myself admit it. But now, he’s here. He’s here. And before either of us has a chance to explain anything more, I kiss him, our mouths crashing together, even as tears are streaming down my face.
“These past days, with you gone, without knowing if you were okay …” Words spill out of me when we part to breathe, my throat closing up with emotion. I have one hand in Brekken’s hair, one on his waist; he’s still cradling my face, and the effects of the healing magic combined with his kisses make me suddenly dizzy. I sway on my feet and a soft noise of alarm escapes Brekken’s lips. He guides me backward, sitting me on the bed and kneeling in front of me. Tears shine on his upturned face, and I’m not sure if they’re mine or his. And before I know it, I’m leaning forward and kissing him again, the snow smell surrounding me like a blizzard without cold. A whiteout.
Brekken’s hands move over my cheeks, down my arms, to my waist. Slow, gentle. “Maddie,” he breathes, hoarse, then lets out the breath. His pupils are blown wide in the gathering dark. “Let’s first deal with the fact that someone tried to kill you, yes? And then we can do this for as long as we want, and be safe doing it.” His hands move in small circles on my waist, and when I try to kiss him again, he pulls back a little—teasingly, but with seriousness in his eyes.
A growl of frustration dies behind my teeth. The problems outside the door to my room are so vast and tangled, and I’m so unequal to them. He’s right, obviously, but he doesn’t understand that he’s asking for something impossible.
And there’s more: doubts and shadows in my mind, momentarily shoved aside by adrenaline and desire, and now slinking back. I don’t want to wait because the truth is, I don’t know what I want. I don’t know how I feel. Everything about this feels right, and yet, only days ago, I was flirting with Taya, learning of her past with a curiosity that I haven’t felt in a long time. I think of the quirk of her mouth, the angry slump of her shoulders and the way she snorts when she’s annoyed, which is often. I think of the burning sadness in her eyes, the secrets. And I know that I can’t just fall back into Brekken as if nothing has changed.
Everything has changed.
I’ve changed.
“Okay,” I whisper, voice ragged. “Okay, let’s talk. Starting with, where have you been?”
“The palace at Myr,” he replies, cracking his old half smile, though it feels more like an attempt to comfort me than anything else. “It’s a long story, but I never meant to leave you, Maddie, I promise.”
“I know,” I say. I scoot aside on the bed, pull him up to sit beside me. Questions battle for dominance on the tip of my tongue, the weight of everything I’ve learned over the past few days pressing in—the complicated web of guilt and double crosses and no answers.
Marcus and the Heiress, Brekken and the stolen keys, my mother the host, whatever that me
ans.
The kid in the antique shop basement and the spark between my fingers when I touched the metal she’d enchanted.
How she trapped wind magic in the spoon, how it ripped through the lake later, burning my skin and setting me free. How binding the magic took something out of her, from her.
“The Heiress told me what you were doing, about the black market,” I say haltingly. “I know Marcus was selling magic objects, and the Heiress was buying them back, and that my mom was involved somehow. And I think …” I stumble, suddenly feeling unsure of myself, but Brekken’s steady gaze on mine encourages me to go on. “I think that Solarians are also involved. I think they’re the ones who can bind magic.”
Brekken is holding my hands, and his thumb has been absently tracing circles on my palm. But now it stills. His brow is furrowed, his face grave in the dim light. I look at him carefully, thinking of the multitude of silver objects covering every surface in the Heiress’s room. The thought of every single one of those objects passing through a Solarian’s hands makes me shudder. And I can’t tell if it’s because of my old fear of Solarians—or because of Sura in the antique shop. She was clearly held in that basement against her will, monster or no monster. I have to get her out, I think distantly. As soon as it’s safe, as soon as we figure out what’s going on.
Brekken closes his eyes briefly, then opens them again and he looks at me. “You’re right.”
My breath freezes in my lungs. Despite everything I’ve seen, part of me still expected to be wrong. Wanted to be wrong. How badly I want there to be some benign explanation, for him to tell me that Solarians in this world are an anomaly, monsters far away in the night and not right beside us, woven through this nest of secrets.
“Maddie,” Brekken says in a careful, soft-edged voice. His thumb traces down mine as he speaks, a comforting gesture. “I was investigating the black market in Fiordenkill, and … the Solarians—I know you hate them, I know—”
“Brekken,” I cut in. Because I don’t want to be comforted, I don’t want to let my childish fears cloud my judgment now that so much else I thought I knew has been turned upside down. “Just tell me what you know about the Solarians. About all of this. Please.”
He takes a long breath and lets it out again. “They can bind any kind of magic,” he says. “They can capture Fiorden or Byrnisian magic and tie it to an object. Metal usually; silver is best.” He looks down at our entwined hands. “Anyone can use the enchanted object just by touching it and commanding the magic loose. I don’t completely understand how it works, but …”
A poisonous-sweet thrill goes through me, like the ache of sugar in my teeth. I wasn’t going crazy earlier. I did unleash magic from the spoon. I remember the rush of power all over again, the feeling of the world opening to me. But I know, too, it’s not a fairy-tale magic. It has a cost.
“I was supposed to be in Havenfall this whole summer, buying artifacts for the Heiress,” he murmurs. While the hesitancy a moment ago felt like he was trying to cover his words in Bubble Wrap, now it just sounds like he’s choosing them carefully. “Then the Silver Prince caught me in the tunnels the night we kissed.”
I nod, my lips pressed together. “The same night the Solarian door opened.”
Brekken’s eyes fly wide. “The Solarian door—open?” he echoes. His eyes lift up, past me, like he can see through the ceiling to the room above. “And one got through?”
“Right.” I squeeze his hands, trying to keep him on topic. “So you didn’t see it happen? You didn’t … open it?”
Brekken shakes his head slowly. “I had no idea.” His eyes go distant, his brow furrowing like he’s attempting to put something together in his mind.
“I don’t understand …,” I begin, hunting for the right words. If Brekken fled back to Fiordenkill before the door even opened, what went wrong between him and the Silver Prince? “Why did you run?”
A shudder passes over Brekken, a shadow flitting across his face, a tremor in his fingers. “I saw something I shouldn’t have,” he whispers. “Do you remember the Silver Prince’s bodyguard? Bram?”
I nod, another shudder ripping through me. The one who got eaten.
“He was a Solarian,” Brekken says. “Maddie, I saw him shapeshift. The Prince ordered Bram to transform into his beast form, and then he stabbed him. I just froze. I saw everything from Marcus’s office.”
My mind feels blank, wiped clean with shock. Bram. Even though I only met him once, I can see him clearly, as if he’s standing in front of me. Pale and silent, lifeless eyes, like a living shadow.
Taya asked me how there could be nothing left of Bram, not even bones. I didn’t think about it, didn’t listen to her. If Brekken’s story is true … it means that Bram’s body wasn’t eaten. It was lying on the office floor that night, wrapped in a carpet. It’s rotting in the woods now.
Which means …
My brain is slow to process it.
The body—the Solarian body—that was Bram.
“Bram was a Solarian,” I say slowly. I’m reeling now. “And the Silver Prince—killed him?” I whisper. “But why?” At this moment, why feels like the only word I can remember.
“Good question,” Brekken mutters. “I asked him that too, when I snapped out of it and ran over to try and stop him. But he just laughed and turned his sword on me.”
His gaze lifts up and off me; his eyes grow distant. “Maybe it had something to do with opening the Solarian doorway. Some kind of dark magic. I just remember all the blood.”
Blood. I think of the day Graylin, Willow, Enetta, the Prince, and I tested the door with Fiorden magic. How the stone seemed to stir under my bloody fingers.
“He wanted the door open,” I whisper, the pieces of the story shifting in my mind, scraping against each other like tectonic plates. “The Silver Prince wanted chaos at Havenfall. So he could take over the inn. He must have known Bram was Solarian. He knew what it would look like when we found the body.”
Brekken’s mouth becomes a flat line. I see the faintest shimmer of anger in his eyes. “What about Marcus?” he asks. “Surely your uncle wouldn’t let that happen.”
My heart and stomach sink together. “You haven’t heard. Marcus is … ill. He’s been unconscious since that night.”
Brekken’s mouth dropped open. “How? What happened?”
Tears burn at my eyes. “We thought a Solarian had gotten him, eaten his soul.” I look down, like I could see right through the floorboards to the first floor and into the ballroom with the Solarian’s cage. I imagine the fiery eyes I saw in the woods fixed on me, sending shivers down my spine. “But I don’t think that makes sense anymore.”
Brekken follows my gaze. “There’s another Solarian, isn’t there?”
“Yes, but that one didn’t come through until the next day. Whatever happened to Marcus happened that first night.”
Brekken blinks, leaning his head against mine. Tiredness tugs my body down, like the Silver Prince has turned up the gravity for the whole inn. I wish I could wrap my arms around Brekken and both of us sink down into the mattress, sleep until this whole mess has magically fixed itself.
“The Heiress always says the Innkeeper is bound to the inn,” Brekken says, his words slow and halting. Curled against him, I feel the vibrations in his chest as he speaks “Maybe the Solarian door opening impacted him somehow.”
“We don’t know how to close it,” I whisper. “Graylin has been trying to heal Marcus with the black market magic, but it’s not working.”
Brekken’s body stiffens abruptly. Surprised, I sit up and look at him, in time to see the color flooding from his face.
“What’s wrong?”
“I …”
For the first time tonight, maybe the first time ever, Brekken looks totally at a loss. He runs his hands through his hair, looks around at my darkening room, as if the answers he seeks are written on the walls.
Sick dread settles into me.
“I lear
ned something about the black market when I was in Fiordenkill,” he whispers. “The Heiress just wanted to keep the objects safe. To keep magic out of the hands of people who would abuse it. She wanted to bring all the silver back to Havenfall. But she didn’t know … there was a reason your uncle was selling the objects, Maddie.”
The cold spreads up through my chest and limbs. “Brekken, what is it?”
“Marcus was trying to save the Solarians,” he says. “They’re not beasts, Maddie. They’re people.”
As his words sink into me, I brace myself for the shock to hit. But it doesn’t. And I realize on some level, I already knew.
“What about the sealed door? The treaty?” I whisper. But I don’t need Brekken to answer that either. There has always been war; that doesn’t make us all monsters.
Brekken shakes his head. “I don’t know what really happened in that fight,” he answers. “But the door closing trapped innocent Solarians in all the worlds, and traders in Byrn and Fiordenkill and Haven are still taking advantage. Capturing them, stealing their magic. That’s who Marcus was trying to save.”
He takes a harsh breath. “Because the Solarians are dying. Because every time a Solarian binds magic to matter, a piece of them is bound too. There’s a word—selu—it means soul, spirit, their essence, whatever you want to call it. There are kidnapped Solarians all over the Adjacent Realms, binding magic—and themselves—to things, and it’s killing them.”
He stands, paces, and I stand too, panic filtering slowly through every cell in my body.
His voice cracks, shadows flickering in his eyes. Whatever he saw in Fiordenkill, it’s clearly ripping him apart inside. “Marcus would track down these objects and ‘sell’ them to safe houses, where the mercenaries couldn’t track them. Then the hosts …”
Hosts. Mom? My fists clench, nails pressing into palms.
“Somehow the hosts would release the selu and put the Solarians back together,” Brekken finishes. “I don’t know how. I didn’t know any of this until the night I left. The Heiress thought—she told me—we were righting Marcus’s wrongs.”