by Sara Holland
“I’m not the Innkeeper.” I correct him hastily. “But I am of this world. Maybe that matters?”
I meet Graylin’s gaze, willing him to understand. This is for Marcus. This is for everyone. But I don’t wait for a nod of approval before I step forward and hold out my arm to Enetta. At this point, my skin is crawling from nerves. I would do almost anything if it meant us getting out of here faster.
Enetta sighs and draws a thin red line across the back of my arm. The sting is quick and unexpected, like a doctor who tells you to count to three and sticks you on two. My breath catches, but Enetta already has me by the shoulder and is propelling me forward, gently in spite of her brusqueness, and she lifts my arm to rest against the cold polished wall.
The charge sweeps the air again and the shadows burst into a silent frenzy—not seaweed this time, but more like tentacles, alive and reaching. It’s all I can do not to jump back as they stretch and wave out of the cracked doorway, licking at the air.
But after a few tense breaths, they retreat through the doorway. The door doesn’t close.
Still, it’s something.
“We should try it with Solarian blood,” I say, surprising myself with my calmness. Maybe it’s just that I’ve burned up my stores of fear, but no one else needs to know that. “We’ll gather a hunting party tomorrow to bring it down, and once we have it, try this again.”
I take the handkerchief Graylin passes me, using it to blot the little bit of blood off my arm, and turn to face Enetta. “Princess, if that doesn’t work, you and your delegates can return home if you wish. But please, give me one more day to fix this. If we have your warriors’ help, I bet we can kill the monster in time for tomorrow’s ball.”
The flattery works. The princess nods. When I stand up, a ray-of-sunshine smile has broken through the clouds on Willow’s face. Graylin looks relieved, and the Silver Prince is watching me, looking thoughtful and faintly impressed.
Despite everything—the fear still running through me, the weight of responsibility, the awfulness of this whole situation—a quick thrill of pride blooms. Maybe I really can do this.
In the entrance hall, we part ways toward our respective rooms, the inn now quiet around us. The dancing is over, though the storm rages on outside. But as I start up the red-and-gold-carpeted staircase toward my room, wanting nothing more than to put my headphones on and drown out the world, someone lays a hand on my arm. The Silver Prince.
“Maddie,” he says. The first time he’s used my nickname. “Can I speak to you privately for a few moments?”
I blink. Did I make some mistake, some misstep in the tunnels? But then the Silver Prince smiles, a different kind of smile than the stately, gentle one I’ve seen on him so far. This one is small, subtle, maybe even a little conspiratorial.
“Of course,” I say, hiding my nervousness. A talk with the Prince is something you don’t turn down. “Where should we go?”
“Follow me,” he says without missing a beat.
We take the stairs up, a boyish spring in the Prince’s step. I’m tired to the bone, but he seems in good spirits, more animated than I’ve ever seen him.
“What are you so thrilled about?” I ask—quietly, so as not to wake the delegates in the rooms we pass. “We didn’t fix the doorway.”
“But it responded to your blood,” he shoots back, and his smile is huge and real. “We’re that much closer to closing the door for good.”
Somehow, we’ve reached the top of the stairs with me scarcely noticing. The glass-paneled door to the observatory is before us, and I hesitate, thinking suddenly of Brekken, but the Prince charges ahead. After a moment, I follow, feeling unmoored but light in his wake.
In the observatory, the sound of the rain drumming against the glass dome is loud, almost too loud to speak. The glass-enclosed space is uncharacteristically dark, the rain blocking any light that the enchanted glass could refract. Heavy fog wreathes the inn and the mountains, above and below and all around us. There’s no moon that I can see, and fat raindrops smear the windows and drip down.
But when the Silver Prince raises his hands, it all stops at once. The rain evaporates from outside the glass, and the clouds scoot away above our heads, leaving a small, perfect circle of clear night sky. Yet the rain continues everywhere else, forming opaque shimmering walls on every side. I feel like we’re in a tall, slender cathedral, a cathedral with fog for a floor and rain for the walls and a roof made of stars.
“How did you do that?” I whisper, awestruck in spite of myself. “I thought you had fire magic.”
The Silver Prince strolls to the wall and slips out of one of the scarcely visible doors there, stepping out onto the narrow balcony. I follow and feel another rush of wonder as I see—but don’t feel—the rain, stopping precisely a few feet away. The stone of the roof beneath us is wet and shining, but we are dry. Moonlight glitters on the Silver Prince’s scaled cheekbones.
“I am not content only to protect Oasis, to keep the storms away from the city walls. I want to create a world where Byrnisians can thrive,” he says. A shooting star winks over his head. “In ten thousand years, I want to be remembered as someone who plumbed the uncharted reaches of magic to save his people.”
I glance at him, surprised to hear his ambition stated so baldly. Yet it’s noble, isn’t it? A spark of recognition goes through me, quickly followed by the now-familiar guilt and sadness. A week ago, if you asked me, I might have said something similar about my someday-leadership of Havenfall. Ten thousand years might be a stretch, but in a hundred years I’d want whoever lives at the inn to remember my name.
But that dream is evaporated now. At this point, I’ll count myself lucky if we get through the summer without any more murders.
I lean out over the low wall surrounding the balcony, stretching my hand to try to touch the wall of rain. Too far—vertigo rears. Almost faster than I can see, the Silver Prince is at my side, his fire-warm hand closing around my shoulder and pulling me gently back. He gives me a small, sad smile, like he understands my desire to feel rain against my skin.
“Wait. Look.”
He reaches up and a little piece of storm cloud detaches from the mass and floats our way, rain gusting down. Bits of lightning flicker silently through it. In a moment, the water hits my palm, warm and urgent.
“What uncharted reaches do you have in mind?” I ask. I think of the silver in the Heiress’s room. I don’t know if the powers she referenced in her records are real or if she’s just scamming clueless humans, but what the Prince is doing right now is far beyond the scope of one element—suggesting that Marcus is at least somewhat mistaken about the limits of magic. The Silver Prince doesn’t answer for a moment. I look over at him to find him looking back, an odd, calm, curious expression on his face.
“I’m glad I could come to the peace summit at last,” he says. “I grow more and more convinced that magic is not something unique to each of our peoples, but a single force that flows through all the worlds.” He turns his hands palm up as they rest on the stone wall, and tosses more tiny bolts of lightning between them, like a cat playing with a ball of yarn. Sparks gather between his fingers. “Think of the solstice—a long day here, an eclipse in my city, an aurora in Fiordenkill. There is something that governs us all, that exists everywhere. We can tap into it in our natural-born ways, but perhaps there are other ways too.”
“Like objects?” I ask, faking casual. I’m not quite ready to tell him what I found in the Heiress’s room, if only because it shows how little control I really have over the inn. But maybe the Prince’s theory of the multiverse can still shed some light on her hoard of silver.
“Objects, yes.” He grins at me, the lightning from his hands reflected in his eyes. It’s so dark out here, yet he seems fully illuminated, like what moonlight and starlight there are have settled on his skin. “Or perhaps there’s a way for humans to access it. Or for anyone in any realm to travel safely, the way Solarians can.” His eyes f
lutter closed for a moment. “Don’t tell Enetta I said this, but I dearly wish to see the Fiorden aurora in my lifetime.”
I laugh, but beneath that, the Silver Prince’s words open a deep pit of longing in me. How many times have I wished for exactly that? To explore other realms, especially Fiordenkill? Brekken has told me so much of auroras, bridges carved of shining ice, great wolves that can run so fast they don’t break the surface of the snow. I always thought I would have to be content with seeing them via the pictures his words painted, and through my dreams. What if there were another way?
“I’ve always wanted magic,” I say, adding a laugh to balance out the longing I’m sure he can hear in my voice. “I think all humans do.”
I try not to think of the fact that I also always dreamed of seeing Fiordenkill with Brekken at my side. I doubt even the Silver Prince knows of magic that can undo a betrayal.
“I think you already have it.” The Silver Prince’s eyes gleam and, as if to emphasize his words, a pair of meteors slashes through the sky above him. In my tiredness, it seems to me they look like portents. But of what, I don’t know.
“I can’t help but think it fate that our reigns should coincide like this,” the Prince goes on. He brushes the back of my hand with his fingers, and it startles me enough that I don’t think to correct him. I’m not a ruler, just …
Just what? A caretaker? A substitute—
“Innkeeper,” the Prince says softly, as if he can read my thoughts. He smiles. “We will put this Solarian in the ground, and then we will find a way to break through to the power that lives in you.”
12
I usually love the rain—the gentle patter of it on rooftops and how it makes the light steady and unchanging from dawn to dusk. Like white noise, it quiets my always-racing mind, makes me feel cozy and protected. When it rains in Sterling, Dad never asks why I’m not going out with my friends. I can stay curled up under the covers, watch old movies and forget about everything else for a while, like the world has paused its turning just for me.
But it’s been raining so long and hard now that everyone at Havenfall is getting antsy, including me. Anxiety bubbles in my gut as I creep down the stairs, careful not to step on any of the spots I know to be creaky, though if the delegates can sleep through the rain pounding on the windowpanes, a loud stair step probably won’t disturb them. It isn’t yet dawn—when our hunting party will go out in search of the loose Solarian—but I’ve been awake since four, the machine-gun rattle of rain on the roof yanking me back every time I slipped toward sleep. I should have known it was a lost cause. It’s probably a good idea to get something in my stomach anyway before I go out in the woods after a monster. Even if my gut is already churning, I need all my strength.
All I want to do is turn around and run back upstairs and lock my door behind me, close the curtains and wait for someone braver, stronger, better to deal with the loose Solarian, the open door, the Heiress’s secrets—all of it. Every cell in my body screams to find a safe corner, curl up, and hide with my back to a wall and wait this all out. The natural thing to do when there’s a predator loose and you’re the prey.
While Graylin spent his spare hours yesterday pouring healing magic into Marcus, Willow was in the library, researching other ways we might try to close the door. But until she hits on something, all we can do is post more guards in the tunnels and, in the meantime, try to hunt down this beast before it starts hunting us. Graylin and Willow and Sal, the Silver Prince and Enetta, and the security staff will all be part of the hunting party. I can’t ask them to risk their lives and not go into the woods myself. We have to find the Solarian and end it. We can’t fail. I can only pray it’s still on the grounds—not gone down the mountain, not escaped into the world to kill someone else’s sister, someone else’s brother, shatter someone else’s life into irreparable shards.
Someone crosses by the stairwell a ways down from me and I freeze. It’s a middle-aged man with pale yellow hair and a furtive way of moving, coming from the direction of the front door and going toward the meeting rooms. He’s there and gone across the hall before I even fully register it, but something about him makes me stop walking.
It’s not that I don’t recognize him. There are plenty of people here I don’t recognize, new staffers or delegates whose names I haven’t gotten around to learning, though Marcus would scold me for that. No, it’s because I did recognize him. But from where? His walk—head down, shoulders bunched up—set off a skin-crawly feeling in me. And the memory of his leering smile …
It hits me. The guy from the bus. The one with the newspaper, who tried to chat me up on the way into Haven.
What is he doing here? And how did he get past the Silver Prince’s boundary charm?
Before I can think too much about it, I change course, turning not left toward the kitchens but right, after the man. A creepy dude on a public bus is bad enough, but a creepy guy in my inn, before dawn, today of all days—I don’t like it. I want to know what his business is at Havenfall. As I turn the corner, I just see the tail of his shabby coat disappearing around the next one. Careful to tread lightly and keep my distance, I trail him across the first floor. The rain masks the sound of my footsteps.
Soon enough, the man vanishes behind a door in a back hallway. It’s one of the meeting rooms, disfavored by the delegates because it’s small and plain with no windows. I pause at the end of the hall, ready to duck back behind the corner if need be and wait to see if he’ll come back out.
He doesn’t. And when I listen closely, I think I can hear a low, muted murmur of voices from inside the room. Goose bumps rise on my arms—he isn’t alone. Maybe he does have a legitimate reason to be here, but I have a bad feeling. Slowly, silently, I drift closer until I’m standing right in front of the door, and the voices resolve into clarity.
“—apologies for dropping by unannounced like this,” says the man from the bus in a greasy, obsequious tone. “But I wanted to ensure that you were still prepared for the drop-off tomorrow, given your missing associate and these new … circumstances.”
“I am.”
I bite my knuckles—a nervous habit—and a good thing, because my hand muffles the gasp that escapes when the Heiress’s voice comes through the door. It is cool, clipped, stately, and unmistakable with her strange, rich-person accent.
“I am not afraid of one stray beast,” she says.
Cold shoots down my spine. She knows. How? To avoid panic, we haven’t told any of the delegates that there’s a Solarian on the loose.
The man’s voice turns low, wheedling. “You’ve got to understand. I have buyers waiting for this stuff.” A little bit of urgency creeps into his car-salesman spiel as he goes on. “So I just want to make sure—”
“Consider yourself assured, Whit,” the Heiress cuts in. “I will be there at the appointed time with what you’ve asked for.”
In another context, her clear disdain for him, Whit, might have made me smirk. But instead, my heart is racing, my stomach churning, as I lean closer to the door. This drop-off they’re talking about must be related to the one referred to in the papers Taya and I stole, if not one and the same. And who is the missing associate the guy mentioned?
A sour taste fills my mouth. Even just in my own head, I don’t have the heart to think his name. Images flash through my vision. His smile when he kissed me. My key ring in her desk. Whatever Brekken was doing with my keys, it must have been connected to the Heiress’s smuggling operation. And the fact that she knows there’s a monster on the grounds makes me even more suspicious that they had something to do with the door opening, as well. But I still don’t know why.
I push away those thoughts. It seems obvious that the Heiress is selling Adjacent Realms artifacts to an outsider, a human. A sleazy one at that. If this gets out—if it hasn’t already—it could expose the inn. It could destroy everything my uncle has worked so hard to preserve.
The anger in my gut builds so fast and hot that I do
n’t realize the voices have stopped. I don’t register the footsteps coming toward the door until it’s too late. I leap back and turn down the hall, but don’t have time to escape before the door swings open and the Heiress storms out, creepy bus guy—Whit—two steps behind her.
They both stop short when they see me. I pivot toward them, hoisting on a fake smile and hoping it looks like I was just passing by. Deep down, though, I know the Heiress isn’t stupid. She may be a lot of things—a liar, a backstabber, a con—but not stupid.
“Madeline,” she says, her voice brittle. “What are you doing here?”
“I live here,” I say. I mean for it to come out light, a joke, but my true feelings sneak in and it drops from my lips hard and sharp-edged. This is my home. “What are you doing here?”
“Just some summit business,” she says, words airy, but there’s strain below the surface.
“Oh?” I look pointedly toward Whit, waiting for an introduction. “Bit early for that, isn’t it?”
If he recognizes me from the bus, he doesn’t show it. He glances rapidly between the Heiress and me, a sheen of sweat growing on his face.
“Yes,” the Heiress says, edging away from me down the hall. “Sensitive business.”
Anger rears up under my skin, and I step closer so that she stops moving. “My apologies, Lady Heiress,” I say, hoping my tone communicates just how not sorry I really am. “But as you know, my uncle is still indisposed, so I’m carrying out the Innkeeper’s duties in his stead. And the protocol says that all new visitors have to be approved by the Innkeeper before they enter the grounds.”
I have no idea if that’s a real rule, but it seems like it should be. Add that to the list of things I need to ask Marcus when he wakes up.
The Heiress’s eyes are wide, surprise and indignation chasing each other across her softly lined face. “I’m sorry, Madeline,” she says eventually, sounding wounded. “But I—”
