PROLOGUE
The first breath of air Marcus takes in another realm feels like lightning. Human lungs aren’t built for this world, for Byrn. He doesn’t know how long he has before they give up and he needs to stagger back through the shining doorway to Haven.
But every new Innkeeper is duty-bound to visit all the remaining worlds, if only once—that’s what his great-grandmother, Annabelle, who ran the Inn at Havenfall for almost a century, told him before she died. So Marcus doesn’t flinch, not with twenty nobles of Byrn lined up in a semicircle around the portal, waiting with scaled cheekbones glittering in the orange light. All of them are gathered, curious to hear the new portal-keeper speak. Behind them, clusters of metallic buildings shimmer against a sky the color of flame.
Havenfall is all celebration, all pomp and ritual and freely flowing spirits, in stark contrast to this intense formality. Now is Marcus’s time. The book he brought with him is heavy in his hands.
He will only read one page. There is more to the peace treaty that he won’t have time to recite: the names of the delegates who died at the inn when the Solarians rioted; the decree to forever seal the gateway to Solaria with old magic; Havenfall’s promise to hunt down all of those who escaped. A reminder to Haven, Fiordenkill, and Byrn that even after nearly a hundred years, rogue Solarians still roam their realms.
Some still blame humans, blame Haven, for the bloodshed. Marcus knows that. It’s now his responsibility, as the portal-keeper, to keep everyone safe. Not just the Byrnisians and Fiordens, but his beloved Graylin; Marcus’s sister, Sylvia; and her children—who will one day inherit the Inn at Havenfall and all that comes with it.
He must remind everyone of their promises to one another. So he lifts the book, the only time this leather-bound volume has ever left the inn’s library, and begins to read aloud from its old, crumbling pages—to tell the waiting crowd that Havenfall remembers.
BYRN, FIORDENKILL, AND HAVEN WITH THIS INSTRUMENT ENTER TOGETHER IN ACCORD.
Let it be known that the representatives of Byrn, Fiordenkill, and Haven are allied in peace and hereby set themselves against the warlike land and denizens of Solaria.
Access, trade, and political or civilian interaction between Solaria and any of the other connected realms, including Haven, are forbidden; any infraction of this law is considered treasonous and punishable as such; as agreed to by the newly Allied Realms of Byrn, Fiordenkill, and Haven, otherwise known as the Last Remaining Adjacent Realms.
1
The bus depot in Denver smells like gasoline and asphalt, unwashed bodies and stale coffee. It’s loud with the creak and huff of buses outside, an old speaker system announcing arrival times in between bursts of static, the thud of footsteps as people run to catch their buses. Everything blurs together into white noise, and as long as I see the mountains out the window, gilded in the afternoon sun, I can imagine I’m somewhere else. The lightning plains of Byrn, or the white deserts the Fiorden delegates have told me about, where the earthquakes are so constant that the land heaves and ripples like a pale sea.
And even without imagining, this decrepit station, for all its bustle and noise, is better than where I was half an hour ago.
Better than the sterile chemical smell and hollow, ringing silence of the maximum-security prison where they’ve kept my mother for more than ten years now.
I stop in front of the arrivals board and hoist my duffel bag higher on my shoulder. I look at the aged screen to try to push the images out of my head. Mom’s face behind the scratched plexiglass, the flat darkness of her eyes. It’s like she doesn’t care, can’t be bothered about what’s going to happen next.
I blink hard, focus on the places and times flickering above me. Omaha, 2:25.
That’s the bus I’m supposed to take. The plan is to stay with Grandma Ellen, my dad’s mom, for the summer, and intern at the insurance company she runs. Dad doesn’t want me at the Inn at Havenfall—not now and not ever again. He didn’t understand Mom’s attachment to the place, and he doesn’t get mine either. It’s like he can sense the glimmer of magic clinging to me when I return, and it makes him suspicious. He says I should be doing something I can put on a college application next year.
And it’s true that Havenfall doesn’t exactly appear in an online search. My working at the inn won’t earn me internship credits anywhere. But these summers are all I have. I’ve been going to the inn for summers since I was six. And the older I get, the more important it is to show Uncle Marcus what I can do, that I can be useful. If all goes well, this time next summer I’ll be traveling to the mountains with more than just a summer bag. Marcus will name me as his inheritor, and I’ll move into the inn for good.
So, no. Clearly I’m not going to Omaha. A sparkling insurance-sales career is not in my future.
My insides feel tense, brittle somehow, and my eyes keep drifting back to the blue smudges of mountains outside the windows. Like I’ll fall to pieces if I’m not among them soon. I look back at the arrivals board and scan a few lines down, past Boise and Laramie and Salt Lake City to Haven. 3:50. Gate 8, the last one, at the dusty far end of the depot.
I glance around the room, where sunlight bounces off the high ceilings. There are only two other people in the waiting area now, a young guy in a hoodie sleeping across four chairs and a middle-aged man with thinning blond hair reading a yellowed newspaper. I go to the far side and sit against the wall on the dingy carpet, next to the outlet that I know from experience is the only one that works, and plug in my phone to let it charge for the long ride.
I should text Marcus and let him know I’m coming. But when I start to type, a sense of dread fills me. What if he tells me not to come? To listen to my dad? Just the thought is almost unbearable. I lock my screen and put it on the floor facedown, then dig my fingers into my palms. If I just show up, he can’t turn me away. Soon I’ll be there, in my room overlooking the valley, dancing in the ballroom, with Brekken under the stars.
Going up into the mountains always feels like I’m leaving the rest of the world behind. In the thinner air, it’s as if I’m someone else. I’m Maddie Morrow, Marcus’s trusted niece and maybe inheritor of the Inn at Havenfall, if I play my cards right and impress the delegates from the Adjacent Realms. Not Maddie Morrow, the girl with the dead older brother, the girl with the mom on death row.
Shit. I didn’t let myself remember those words until now. I got all the way out of Sterling Correctional’s visiting hall, onto the bus on the county road, to the depot, and into this corner before I thought about them. And now the memories flood back in with a rush of nausea. The stares and whispers that follow me everywhere: in the halls at school, at the grocery store, even at home, Dad and his wife, Marla, trailing me with their eyes like any second I might snap, like whatever sickness Mom has lives in me too.
But Mom is the worst part of it. Her apathy. When the death sentence was first handed down, I thought maybe, just maybe, this would shock her into admitting the truth. That she didn’t kill Nathan eleven years ago. And even if no one but me really believed her, it would be enough to keep her alive.
But when I sat across from her this morning, the plexiglass between us, she was the same blank face she’s been for eleven years. She just blinked, slowly, when I told her for the thousandth time—I was there. I saw the thing in our house. It came in through the window; I saw the glass on the floor.