by Sara Holland
Willow is sprinting toward the juncture from the staircase, hands flung wide, wind whipping at her hair. Graylin is beside her, dagger drawn, Brekken on her other side. The Silver Prince is just a few feet from me, long daggers in both his hands.
He turns to face the staircase, a faint smile playing over his face. For a stretching instant, everything is still. His shout seems to echo in the juncture, cling to the walls and slither from tunnel mouths just like the fog he created.
I will have the omphalos.
Spears of ice fly together in the air toward Brekken, Willow, and Graylin. Brekken’s sword whips through the onslaught, shattering shards everywhere. The hailstorm beats at them, but Willow raises her hands, grimacing, and the air in front of them shimmers.
There’s more movement behind them, though it’s hard to hear over the rattle of hail and howl of wind, the juncture crackling with weather magic. Through the shimmering air, I see people flooding from the upstairs hallway to come to a stop behind Graylin, Willow, and Brekken. The rest of the delegates. Wide eyes, mouths hanging open.
A few people draw blades, and my heart sticks in my throat as I realize they’re mostly Byrnisians. Will they attack us to help their prince?
“You’re outnumbered,” I rasp to the Prince, hoping I sound braver than I feel. “I am the Innkeeper. And I want you to leave.”
I clench my fingers tighter around the knife, trying to figure out what to do. A little voice in my head whispers kill him—step forward and put my knife in his throat—but I’m afraid of what will happen when this stillness is shattered. Willow won’t be able to keep up her wind shield forever. Everyone I’m responsible for is gathered in the tunnels. Everything hanging in the balance.
The Silver Prince moves suddenly, his limbs blurring in the dark. Before I can so much as draw breath, he’s behind me, dagger blade resting lightly against my throat.
The hailstorm fades into nothing, chunks of leftover ice plummeting and melting into the water that swirls around our ankles. Suddenly the only sounds are my own harsh breathing and the pounding of my heart, the lapping of waves against the wall and the arctic crackle of ice, and a low humming that seems to be coming from the Solarian doorway. Brekken moves toward me, but the Prince cocks his head and Brekken freezes. Graylin looks stricken. The dozens of people in the main tunnel are silent. Too far away to do anything.
In the tense stillness, I can feel the Silver Prince’s heart beating at my back. What is this all for? I want to ask him. But, maybe because I’m reasonably sure I’m about to die, the words don’t come out.
“Where’s your Solarian?” he says in my ear, mocking. I swallow, the dagger cutting slightly into my skin. Warm wetness trickles down. I don’t know where Taya is.
But I see Graylin’s face across the juncture. See his eyes focus somewhere behind me, along with everyone else in the space. The Silver Prince turns around, rotating me with him.
Taya stands beyond me, deep in the Solarian tunnel. She’s human again and bloodied from the fight, blood streaking her arms and trickling from the corner of her mouth. Wreathed in fog, she’s standing right in front of the doorway, framed in its eerie light. The crack in the Solarian door is wider than ever. Its orange light spills over her, making her look cast out of gold. Her hair flies in all directions; her arms are slightly raised as if in self-defense. Her back is to the door, and her eyes are wild.
And the doorway is reacting to her, seeming to expand and contract with each heave of her chest. Flashes of different, unearthly colors play around the edges and cracks into the world beyond. I catch glimpses of a blazing golden sky and a hill gleaming with buildings.
Her world.
Taya’s chin is high and her eyes are fire. Even though she’s soaked through and gaunt and shivering, knee-high in the Prince’s flood, she stands straight and strong. She’s beautiful and terrible bathed in the Solarian light. It’s hard to believe I ever thought she was human. She is tied to the door and the door to her. I know it at the cellular level. The power rolls off her like the rays of the sun. As tangible as the fire and hail.
The Silver Prince’s mouth is still frozen in a cruel smile, but his eyes are wide. He is afraid. He is afraid of Solaria, just like I used to be, but I know fear can be as volatile as gunpowder. I want to go to Taya and pull her away from the door, away from the precipice it feels like she’s balanced on, but the Prince still has his knife on me.
“Go back to Oasis,” Taya tells the Prince. “Or I’ll bring this whole place down and you’ll never have your throne room.”
Her words are trembling, like she’s bearing up under a great weight. She raises her right hand high, and her palm is bloody. When she places it against the stone, a shock wave tears through the tunnels, the ground convulsing beneath our feet.
I twist away from the Silver Prince as we both stumble in the moment before I hit the ground. The Prince lunges toward Taya, but the ground heaves and he tumbles backward into the juncture, the knife clattering away. I seize it when it skitters in my direction and shove to my feet, getting between him and Taya, so he’s halfway between us and Brekken’s sword.
“Go!” Taya snarls. The earth continues to tremble, thrumming like a living thing beneath my shoes. If I closed my eyes, I could be standing in the aisle of an ancient, rickety bus as it climbed up a mountain.
The Silver Prince stands stock-still for a seemingly endless moment, waging war with his eyes.
But then he breaks.
He turns and shoots into the Byrnisian tunnel, so fast he’s a blur. The door opens before him, and I see a fiery orange sky, a broad metallic wall. And then he’s gone, the ground convulsing as one last gust of angry wind whooshes through the juncture.
Relief fills me, and I feel a grin spread across my face as I look at Brekken. For a second, he grins back. But then the smile falls away, quick and sharp as ice cracking.
“Taya!” he yells. “Get back—”
I whirl around as the earth seizes once more, so violently I fall to my knees. The Solarian door flares up, wide open for a heartbeat, spilling blinding gold light. I see Taya’s silhouette in it, hair flying in all directions, face tilted up in wonder or horror.
Then the door slams shut, and she’s gone.
25
That night, the mountain twilight spills lavender light over Brekken’s face through the windshield of the inn’s jeep. We’re parked in front of the pizza place in town, waiting for them to carry out our order—as many pizzas as you can make. The radio plays, too soft to make out the words to the song, just enough to fill the silence.
This is the kind of stuff I didn’t think about when I was a kid dreaming of becoming the Innkeeper. How people need to eat even when the earth has literally shifted under your feet, even on a day when several people have tried to murder you and you’ve watched your friend evaporate into another world. Even when you don’t know if Solaria sucked her in or if she meant to go, and you don’t know which one would be worse.
Even when Nate—and I can hardly even form the words in my head—Nate might not be dead. Even when most of your kitchen staff has fled the inn and the idea of pouring a bowl of cereal for yourself, much less figuring something out for fifty confused and scared and angry delegates, feels unfathomable. Even then.
So, pizza.
“Taya will be all right, you know,” Brekken says, looking over at me from the passenger seat. “That’s her world.”
“We can’t know that,” I reply, keeping my eyes ahead, watching the pizzeria’s neon sign flicker against the darkening sky.
I’ve cracked the windows, letting in the sounds of crickets and frogs and wind through the pines. It feels absurdly peaceful down here, impossible to believe that only a half mile of road and a few hours separate this from the hail and fire and blood of our battle with the Silver Prince. Part of me just wants to keep driving until I’m back in Sterling. There are no choices to make there. No one else who will get hurt because of me.
&nbs
p; You’ve hurt people in the real world, something in me whispers. The old voice of guilt—if you had screamed, if you had done something, Nate wouldn’t be gone.
But it wasn’t my choices that hurt my brother, I know now. Someone broke into our house. Someone took him. Not one starved soul-devourer, but a conspiracy too deep and dangerous to comprehend then.
And too big for me to fight now. Soon. But not now.
“We don’t know anything about Solaria. It could be a wasteland,” I say to Brekken. Even though I know that Solarians—at least some Solarians—aren’t evil, it’s hard to erase the image I built up in my head for so many years. That Solaria is a world of darkness, of hunger and monsters. I don’t want to think of Taya there. And Nate. My brother—not my biological brother, as I always thought, but still my brother. A Solarian, all along.
Brekken looks steadily at me, an unspoken question in his eyes. I look back and smile, but it feels like someone is playing tug-of-war with my heart.
He looks exactly how I remember him from our first night here, just a little more worn, a little sadder. Even dressed in jeans and a Boulder T-shirt borrowed from Jayden, playing with the tab of his Coke can, he looks like a soldier, his posture straight and his copper hair neatly combed. Strong. Safe. Like I could bury my head in the space between his neck and shoulder and shut out the world.
He would let me. He would protect me. I could lean over the dashboard right now and press my lips to his cheek and chase everything else away for a little while. I could turn back time and be the girl kissing him in the hayloft, feeling nothing but light and want and the summer stretching out ahead of me like a trail of sun on Mirror Lake.
But something has shifted between us. I want to kiss him, want to feel his arms around me, but there’s a sharp edge buried in the longing. I know all the secrets were him trying to protect me. I know he and the Heiress thought Marcus was supplying the black market by smuggling the silver objects out of Havenfall, before he knew what they really were—fragments of captive Solarians’ souls—and maybe Brekken thought my loyalty to my uncle would win out over doing what was right.
But still, it’s a lot to get used to. Everything could have been so much simpler if he’d just told me. Trusted me, his best friend.
And Taya. I see her behind my eyes when I blink. I don’t think even kissing Brekken could chase away the image of her leaving, no matter how much I might want it to. It’s a waste of energy worrying about her, seeing as there’s not a single thing in the world I can do to help her, to find her. But I can’t stop wanting to try.
“She’s a Solarian,” he says. “If anyone can make it there, she will.”
I nod and blink to smother the nascent sting of tears. I have to believe him. I don’t have a choice. I can’t help Taya—at least not right now, when there are people here that need me to have my head in the game.
A knock on the window makes my heart stop for half a second. I whip around, my jumbled mind half-expecting to see the Silver Prince, but it’s just a frazzled-looking Jorge, the Pizza Palace owner, shoulders hunched under the weight of two bright red insulated delivery bags. Behind him, two apron-clad kids carrying more pizzas stare warily into the jeep as Brekken hurries out and pops the trunk. I get out, too, and follow Jorge inside with my wallet.
“Big party?” he asks as he rings me up.
I fake a smile, but even as I do it, I can feel that it must look more like a grimace. “The hotel refrigerator broke. Everything went bad.”
The irritated lines on Jorge’s face smooth out into sympathy. A handful of other patrons in the eighties-themed restaurant look curiously on as I hand over Marcus’s credit card.
I try not to look at the eye-popping price as I do the math for a tip. At some point, I should probably figure out where the money to run Havenfall comes from. But that’s a problem for another day.
Dark has started to fall by the time Brekken and I crest the hill leading back to the inn, the lilac twilight fading into the color of plums or bruises. I press the brakes so we can take it all in. The moon is rising, bright as a new silver coin, and balanced between it and its Mirror Lake reflection is Havenfall, an indigo silhouette against the sky.
Even after everything, Havenfall still takes my breath away. The shape of it is so familiar, I could draw the lines freehand in my sleep. But as wind sweeps over the mountain and ruffles all the trees at once, an invisible current eddying around the inn, it feels different too. Bigger and darker, shadows reaching out from it like something alive.
It feels alive. I can almost sense the pulse of energy from beneath the earth, the tunnels far below like veins. Even after everything, Havenfall still stands, beautiful and dangerous. Even if I couldn’t see it before, it was always dangerous, but that doesn’t lessen the beauty.
Omphalos.
The center of everything, the heart. A home for people from all the worlds. If I’m strong enough to keep it that way.
Brekken reaches out and rests his hand on top of mine on the gearshift, and a spark of electricity travels through me. I doubt anything could stop his having that effect on me. His grip is gentle but strong, warm. For a moment, before we start driving again, I turn my palm up and let our fingers interlace, our palms press together. I don’t know what it means, but I know that somehow, we are bound together. That our story is still unfolding.
I have two months left of summer, two months to pick up Havenfall’s scattered pieces, to rebuild the delegates’ trust in me that I’ve burned away. Two months to decide what my next steps will be. There’s so much to do. Whatever strength Brekken can give me, I need it.
As the delegates gather for dinner, I peek into the dining hall through the back door. Even if I’m not ready to face everyone just yet, it seems prudent to make sure the guests aren’t rioting. Through the open doorway, I see pizza boxes strewn over the grand tables. The familiar smell of melted cheese and grease is a small comfort—one that never fails to make me feel like I’m four again. I imagine Mom cutting up my pizza into little bite-size squares. What would she think if she could see me now?
I can tell her, I realize, a spear of guilt and grief over lost time lancing through me. Ever since I arrived at Havenfall, ever since the sentencing, I’ve thought of her as if she’s already dead. I took her silence as surrender. But that’s not the Mom I remember, or the woman I read about in the Heiress’s files. She was a player in this game, working together with Marcus to save the captive Solarians. I have to tell her I know the truth. I have to tell her that Nate could still be alive.
I understand now that what happened to Mom and Nate wasn’t my fault, but there are so many things I’ve done wrong since then. Writing Mom off as a lost cause. Not looking hard enough for the truth about Nate. But I can’t let myself sink into a morass of shame. If I want them back—my heart races at the possibility—I need to keep moving forward. Starting by winning over the delegates tonight.
The remaining guests cluster near the front of the room, eating halfheartedly while they await my announcement, their eyes constantly flickering to me at the front table. At a table a few yards away, Brekken cuts a piece of pizza into small pieces—just like Mom used to do for me—and puts the plate in front of Sura, the Solarian girl from the antique shop. She’s sitting between Brekken and the Heiress now, wide-eyed and flinching at every noise, even though the hall is quieter than normal.
While the healers tended to me and Brekken after the fight with the Silver Prince, we explained to Graylin, Willow, Sal, and, crucially, the Heiress what we had learned about Solarians and selu and the silver trade. I stayed as calm as I could, careful not to let any anger at the Heiress into my voice. She was horrified at her mistake. It wasn’t her fault—she didn’t know that the silver she was buying held slivered bits of stolen souls—and more pieces of selu are in traders’ hands because of her actions.
After Brekken and I related the truth, the four of them drove straight to the antique shop to free the girl and bring her here.
Watching her now, though, her wide blank eyes and careful movements make my heart twist as I think about how she gifted me her magic, her selu.
Can it be restored to her—can all the Solarians who have been harmed by the traders be restored? I hope so, but I’m not sure. I wonder if the legend about Solarians stealing souls is just another way their own history has been twisted against them.
I tear my gaze from her and look over at the other tables. Part of me wants to smile at the sight of these elegant, otherworldly delegates peering discreetly over at the human table to see how to eat a slice of pizza. No such thing in the Adjacent Realms, I guess. But the larger part of me is worried over the fact that there is a human table. That in this atmosphere of uncertainty and suspicion, everyone has separated and is sitting with their kind. The Byrnisian delegation fills an entire table, while the remnants of the Fiordenkill delegation and human staff, sitting apart at different tables, look especially motley in comparison.
They all know what happened with the Silver Prince—from his plot to control the inn to murdering Bram to his attack on Max. I have a new plan. Graylin and Willow were skeptical, but secrets and lies got us here. I couldn’t justify any more. It won’t be long until we hit the two-week mark, where the worlds will align and allow people to come and go through the Fiordenkill and Byrnisian doorways. If the delegates leave, they leave.
And they still might.
But there’s one more thing I have to do before I get up in front of them and make my case.
26
When I slip into Marcus’s room, my heart leaps with joy before I fully process what I’m seeing.
Marcus is sitting up. His eyes are open.
A thousand emotions crash into me at once as I run over to the bedside. Graylin manages to jump out of the way just in time.
