by Sara Holland
His voice sounds distant, like we’re standing on opposite sides of a chasm. And yet it’s close, too, closer than breath, closer than my own thoughts. Like he’s speaking from inside my chest.
Because didn’t I know? Didn’t I know that it cost Sura to enchant just that little spoon, to give me the magic that would save my life? The object is heavy in my pocket now. Does it contain a sliver of her soul? Did she part with a piece of herself for my sake?
But before I can explain everything that’s coming together in my head, there’s a pounding at my bedroom door, and then it bursts open by force, slamming violently against the wall.
“Traitor!”
Brekken whirls around as three Byrnisian soldiers materialize in my doorway. The seconds go by in stop motion, slow and hyper-fast all at once. They’re inside before I can even form a thought, hauling Brekken back, wrenching his arms behind him.
“Take him to the tunnels,” a cool voice says.
The soldiers drag Brekken away, his eyes are boring into mine, and then the Silver Prince is standing in front of me in my otherwise empty room. I feel out of my body again, like maybe nothing is real.
“You still love him,” the Prince observes.
There’s no warmth in his voice, no emotion at all, just a detached, almost academic curiosity. There’s none of the compassion he showed me when we spoke at Marcus’s bedside. Or the closeness—or was it flirting?—in the observatory. This is the Silver Prince from the books in the library. And something comes back to me, distant and quiet, but carried on the currents of adrenaline from this morning’s murder attempt. He told me that not everyone has good intentions.
Eerie calm descends over me. I have to lie.
“I didn’t know he was coming back,” I say.
“It looks like you were glad to see him.”
“Good thing I held him here for you,” I retort, refusing to give him an inch.
There’s the note of a challenge there, but the Silver Prince doesn’t call me on it. Just smiles, faintly.
“Perhaps you’re developing better judgment, then. I wondered, when I saw that staffer flee. Taya?”
Cold seizes my heart, and I flinch before I can stop myself. “What does she have to do with anything?”
Is he angry I didn’t dose Taya with forgetting-wine? How does he even know her name?
“She is a liar,” the Prince says with an icy smile. “Call it an intuition. Rule long enough, and you’ll understand. You’re young—it’s all right to have trusted wrong.”
Cold spills through my veins. But now it’s there because I want it to be. Protective, powerful, like a Fiordenkill wind that drives enemies away.
“You’re right,” I say, holding his gaze. “I trusted wrong this whole time.”
23
After the Silver Prince leaves me alone, I head straight down to the tunnels.
When I reach the juncture, four Byrnisian guards are already there, Sal’s human crew gone. One Byrnisian is stationed in front of each of the three tunnel mouths to Fiordenkill, Byrn, and Solaria, and one stands in front of the tunnel to Tiria, a dead world, where the Prince must be keeping Brekken and the Solarian beast.
I don’t recognize the guards from the summit, but everything about them says professional. They hold metallic staffs with sharp ends, and they look at me when I enter. Behind three of them—the tunnels to Fiordenkill, Solaria, and Tiria—a dull steel web stretches over the tunnel mouth, blocking the way. The Prince might not be able to close the door to Fiordenkill, but he can stop anyone from coming or going.
Anxiety makes sweat prickle my palms, but I stand straight, trying to sound calm and authoritative as I address the man guarding the opening of the Tiria tunnel.
“I’m Madeline Morrow. The Innkeeper. Here to see the Fiorden prisoner.”
The guard is a tall man with white hair and a greenish cast to his skin. He steps forward and regards me skeptically. His staff glitters in the low light as he leans down, and I can’t help but tense, the memory jumping into my head of the Byrnisian man in the antique shop, the wind magic that whipped up out of nowhere and flung me against the wall.
I can feel the magic coming from the guard now, as well as from the other guards at my back, which is strange because before this summer, magic never felt dangerous. But I raise my head so the guard can see my face. I try not to let my worry show, though I’m nothing but fear inside.
For Marcus. Havenfall. The Solarian girl, Sura. Taya. Brekken.
He examines me for a moment, and then stands back wordlessly. He lifts the staff an inch and taps it against the stone floor, and the metal barricade blocking the Tiria tunnel mouth starts to retract, the strands of iron snaking back into the stone.
The part of my mind that’s still me, that’s not numb with shock and fear, wonders how that works. Do the Byrnisians control the metal in the mountain too?
The glitter of a key ring on the guard’s belt catches my eye. I’ll need his keys to break Brekken out.
“Will you walk down the tunnel with me?” I ask the guard. I don’t really have to fake the tremor in my voice.
The guard’s jaw tightens in exasperation, but he nods and walks beside me into the dark tunnel. Staying half a step behind him, I reach surreptitiously into my pocket until my fingers find the enchanted spoon. When I was drowning, calling on the magic felt instinctive, but now I have to concentrate to call up the wind magic the little girl captured and channeled into the spoon. I will a wind to start up, and a short, strong gust sweeps up the other end of the tunnel.
The guard tenses and he steps forward, his hand going to the sword at his left hip. It’s my chance. I already have my dagger in hand, and I reach out with it, cutting the leather cord that secures his keys to his belt and grabbing them when they fall before they can make a sound.
For a split second, just a moment, I feel a rush of power. We come into sight of the bend in the tunnel, and I touch the guard on the arm. “Thank you. I can take it from here.”
I clench my left fist tight, hiding the stolen keys. How long do I have before he notices?
The guard appraises me. “All right. Careful—the Solarian’s cell is down here, too. You’ll have to pass it first.”
Alone, I walk into darkness. The metal grate reappears behind me, locking me in. There are no torches, and it’s becoming harder and harder to see with every step. The temperature drops, too, and I shiver, my clothes clinging to my damp skin.
Up ahead, everything is quiet. Is Brekken really down here?
As the light from behind me fades to almost nothing, I put my hands out, guiding myself along the wall. My eyes adjust slowly, just enough for me to see the vague shape of the tunnel. Deeper, deeper, until—
Stone turns to metal under my left hand, and I know this is another iron web. Something moves behind the bars, paler than the dark stone, and I stop. My heart is in my throat and my hands are shaking.
In the darkness, I can hear ragged breathing, but I can’t tell if it’s mine or someone else, something else.
I see a light emanating from its cell, a light so faint as to hardly be there at all. As I approach the metal bars, I see it’s from a plastic star, like a night-light or key-chain lamp. It’s lying on the ground on the other side of the iron web. Lying between the paws of the Solarian.
I think distantly of the Solarian delegates that summered at Havenfall in centuries past. How sometimes they’d run through the woods in their beast forms, and other times they’d be all but human, sleeping in the same little eaved rooms as everyone else, eating in the dining hall, talking politics, dancing in the ballroom. Not monsters at all.
The beast is watching me. There’s something so aware in its posture. In how it holds its left foreleg tenderly close to its body. In its eyes.
Those eyes that look so. Damn. Familiar.
And just like that, something clicks. One more tectonic plate groaning into place, just a fraction of an inch, but in that instant my whole world
warps.
My knees give out. I catch myself on the gate, threading my fingers through. The Solarian fills my vision, the only thing in the world.
“It’s you.” My words stumble out, a ragged whisper. “It’s you, isn’t it?”
The Solarian blinks. Black, blue, black again. Immeasurable sadness in the look she gives me.
And then smoke streams over her body, dark as ink, coming from nowhere I can discern.
When it clears, Taya is lying on the stone.
Her hair spills over the ground, the lightest thing in this dark tunnel.
She is naked, battered, and when the strange smoke dissipates, her eyes are closed.
I don’t even realize I’m moving, unlocking the door with the guard’s keys. Although my mind is still blank with shock, I yank my T-shirt over my head and drop it by her. In my jeans and cami, I run farther down the hall, softly calling out to Brekken.
There’s a moment of nothing, then the snick of a match flaring and an oil lamp flickers to life. My heart jumps so violently I almost think it’s going to tear out of my chest as yellow light illuminates the contours of Brekken’s face.
He’s sitting against the far wall of another makeshift cell. He drops the spent match and looks up at me.
“Shh,” I say, moving up to the iron net separating Brekken from me, and I put my hands on the cold metal, too finely woven to put anything more than fingers through. I unlock the cell door. “Your cloak,” I gasp.
He doesn’t argue, his face pinched with worry as he swings off his fur cloak and opens the door to hand it to me.
Taya has raised herself into a sitting position by the time I get back. She looks terrible, gaunt and so pale, with bruises marring her face, torso, and arms and legs. But there’s a determination in her expression like nothing I’ve ever seen, hard and permanent as if carved out of marble, and a faint glow lights up her eyes like oil slicks. Black, no color, and every color at the same time.
I open Taya’s cell door and slip inside as she slumps forward; I lunge toward her and support her shoulder with one hand, pushing the shirt and cloak into her arms. She holds them to her chest, but doesn’t move any farther. Her head is down, her back heaving as she tries to catch her breath, and I can feel her heart pounding where my hand supports her shoulder, like her heart lives right under the surface.
“It’s okay,” she whispers after a long moment, even though her voice sounds like she’s swallowed steel wool. “I’m okay.”
She straightens, and I back up from her and retreat into the tunnel so she can get dressed. My mouth is dry as sand, chills chasing each other across my skin. My heart feels like it’s about to leap from between my lips.
Until Taya’s voice comes softly. “I’m good.”
I turn around slowly, terror and shock coursing in equal measure through my veins, as Brekken cautiously comes to stand beside me. Two words take up all the space in my head, pushing out everything else, the memory of how to breathe, my own name.
Taya.
Solarian.
She’s wearing my big T-shirt with Brekken’s cloak over her shoulders. Holding it closed with one hand and supporting herself against the wall with the other, Taya gives us both a tight smile, her eyes lingering on Brekken.
“I’m Taya. Nice to meet you.”
Under other circumstances, I’d laugh at the look of total confusion on Brekken’s handsome face. After a moment, he collects himself and takes a step toward her, reaching his hand out, then seems to think better of it and stops, giving her a nod instead.
“Brekken of Myr.”
Silence falls, none of us knowing what to do next. Taya looks at me now, really looks at me for the first time, and there’s a question in her eyes, burning just as bright as the fire I saw there a moment ago.
“So,” she says, her tone determinedly casual. “It seems like I’m a Solarian.”
“I’m sorry I shot you,” I blurt out.
Her lips twitch. “I’m sorry I scared you.” She takes a shuddering breath and glances at the wall to her left—in the direction, I realize with a chill, of the Solarian doorway, if you drilled straight through the tunnels.
“How long have you known?” I ask carefully.
“Not for sure until yesterday.” She smiles, but without any real feeling to it. “On our second day here, I felt drawn to the tunnels; I bribed one of the guards to let me down to see them. And when I was in front of the Solarian door, I blacked out; there’s a few minutes I don’t remember.” She extends her hand, like she expects to see claws there.
I remember coming across Willow castigating her in the common room after she went to the tunnels. The claw marks we found outside the Solarian door.
“That started happening more and more,” she says, eyes distant. “I could feel myself changing, but I thought I was just dreaming or hallucinating. I can’t control it. I just know I have to get outside when I feel it coming on. Some kind of instinct.”
She meets my eyes, her gaze pleading. “I had no idea what was going on, Maddie. It had never happened before.”
She looks normal; she looks shaken. But something is different. I can feel the power coming from her, the magic, just as strong as from any Fiorden noble or Byrnisian soldier. It feels like sparks, like a light, burning, invisible snow falling over my skin. It feels alien, and yet I want to get closer, want to open my arms and feel as much of it as I can.
But no. I have to think. “The door opened wider after you came down here,” I say. “Do you think that was you?” If the open door is what’s disrupting the balance and keeping Marcus unconscious … If Bram’s blood opened the door, could Taya close it?
Taya looks between us, shrugging; Brekken bites his lips, eyes fixed on her.
“You clearly have strong magic,” he says, his tone polite even as his voice trembles slightly. They both look at me, waiting for me to weigh in, but I have nothing. Shock has wiped my mind clean of words.
“Maddie,” Taya says. Her voice is quiet but ragged, urgent. “I didn’t mean to lie to you. And I didn’t hurt Max.”
I take a deep, centering breath. “I believe you,” I say, and I do. Maybe I shouldn’t, and my mind is racing with other questions, but I do believe that much. “Why did you go to the door?” I ask her after a moment. A weird, unsettled feeling stirs my stomach. “Do you want … do you want to go through?”
“No.” But Taya sounds less certain of this.
She slides into a sitting position on the floor, and Brekken and I instinctively follow suit. The stone floor is cold through my damp jeans, and distantly I’m still aware of the guards’ presence somewhere behind us, but that all feels unimportant right now in comparison to the words trickling from Taya’s lips.
“This world is my home,” she says, reaching down to toy with a speck of dirt from the floor. “All that stuff I told you about foster care, about Terran, that was true. My life is here, my brother is here. My parents never told me we were Solarian. I don’t even know what that means really. I thought I was just like you.”
Brekken is the next one to speak. “What about before that?” he asks, carefully. “What do you remember of where you came from?”
She looks down at her hands, her lips pressing together. I think of everything she’s told me about her family. Their car going off a bridge. The parade of foster homes. Her twin, Terran, and her determination to find him.
“My brother was like me,” she says slowly. “I remember he told me once we were special, magical. We were just little kids, but I think he knew somehow.” Her white fingers twist around each other in the dark. “We lived in Nevada until I was three. Then our parents died and Terran and I went into separate foster homes. Everything was normal, or normal enough, until I got here.”
In my head, I hear Brekken’s voice. Every time a Solarian binds magic to matter, a piece of them is bound too. I see the girl from the antique shop slumping against the wall. A sense of dark foreboding and a question gather in my chest.
I’m not sure I want to know the answer, but we’re short on both time and options, so I make myself ask it anyway.
“Do you remember any weird objects from when you were little?” I try my best to keep the fear out of my voice. “Objects made out of silver, especially.”
Taya tilts her head at me. “Like jewelry?”
“Anything,” I say, deliberately casual. “Jewelry, yeah, or trays or pens or marbles. It could have been anything.”
She blinks at me. “Actually, now that I think about it, yeah,” she says at length. “My brother, Terran, had this set of jacks.”
My breath halts.
A faint, joyless smile curves Taya’s lips. “He was obsessed with them.”
Her words hit me like raindrops and slide off, their meaning not sinking in. Nothing sinks in except for the tiny pinprick of pain under my collar, so slight that I almost never even notice it anymore.
The place where one of Nathan’s old jacks, strung on a silver chain, rests below my collarbone.
“When you two were separated …,” I whisper.
Brekken must hear something off in my voice; I see him glance at me out of the corner of my vision, but I can’t tear my eyes away from Taya. Can’t stop scouring her face for clues, as if I’ll be able to find something in the dark of her eyes beyond even what she remembers.
“Who took him when you were separated?”
Her brow furrows. “Two social workers,” she says with a small shrug.
I can tell she doesn’t get why this is important. I almost don’t either. But urgency fires my blood; memories swim to the surface, but whenever I try to grasp them, they slip through my hands back into the shadows.
“It was so long ago,” Taya says, holding my gaze.
She places her hand over mine, and I take it gratefully, glad for something to hold on to. Her skin is hot, almost to the point of burning, but I twine my fingers through hers and let the warmth flood me. It’s like she knows I need something to ground me, can tell that the earth is coming apart beneath my feet.
“It was two social workers, a man and a woman,” she says. “They told Terran and me they were brother and sister, just like us. But that we couldn’t stay together, or bad people might find us.” She breaks off and blinks, a tear slipping down her cheek. “That never made any sense. Why would anyone be after us?”