As soon as the words are out, I regret them. Brekken’s eyes widen, and it feels as though I’ve given too much away.
“Your home?” the Silver Prince asks.
His words are affectless; we could be discussing anything. Still, my skin prickles. Why is he spending his first visit to the Adjacent Realms—a visit that must have been in the works for years—asking the sixteen-year-old Innkeeper’s niece about her feelings? What is that Byrnisian intuition telling him about me?
“After this summer, Marcus will decide if I can stay for good.” I look at myself in the mirror along the wall. The gems in my ears glitter in the low light, and laughter and music weave together all around like a beautiful net. “It’s—a lot of pressure is all.”
Then, I feel stupid. The Silver Prince saved his people from the elemental storms that obliterated almost the whole of his world. He maintains the barriers that keep everyone in Oasis alive. What do I know about pressure?
But when he smiles, it’s sympathetic. “These are dangerous times,” he says. His eyes meet mine in the reflection. He seems to give off his own light; I understand why his people follow him. But he gives me the feeling of driving down winding mountain roads. It’s awe-inspiring, despite the fact that—or maybe because—it’s a long way down. There’s a feeling of power coiled inside the Prince. The air crackles a little around him.
“But,” he adds, “I sense danger is familiar to you.”
I look toward him, surprised and wary. “What do you mean?”
An image flashes, as it so often does—my mother and brother cowering in the kitchen as a dark shadow bears down on them. My brother’s piercing scream. But I push it away, panic gathering in me, as if somehow the memory will spill out into the Silver Prince’s sight. Like he could see how I hid, how I let a Solarian kill Nathan.
“I understand Marcus’s fears,” the Silver Prince says, still affectless. “But strife shapes us into who we are meant to be. And places us where we are meant to be. Don’t you think?”
Even though he’s a total stranger, something in me leaps at the words, overjoyed to be seen. I nod, my pulse racing for some reason.
Brekken clears his throat, and the Prince smiles. Even his teeth have a silvery tint. I wonder what his life is like at home in dangerous and wild Byrn. A place ravaged by storms born of elemental magic run amok.
“Well, I must be off,” he says. “It was a pleasure to meet you both.” He inclines his head at Brekken and me in turn, and then sweeps away.
It’s not until he’s gone that I think to ask what he meant by dangerous times.
Brekken turns to me, a crease between his eyebrows. “Are you all right?”
“Of course.” I let out a laugh that, somewhat to my surprise, is real.
Maybe he’s right, maybe Marcus is right to be afraid. The Silver Prince certainly seemed dangerous, as does Brekken in a way, with his sharp-cut uniform and eyes I could lose myself in. But that just makes it all the more thrilling, my knowledge of these people and theirs of me.
Havenfall might be dangerous, but I am equal to it. I’m part of it. I belong here, more than anywhere else.
I take a sip of my drink. Fizzy heat rushes down my throat, warms my chest. Feeling emboldened, I pluck the other drink from Brekken’s hand and put them on a side table. Then I do what I wanted to do earlier and twine my arms around his neck as a new song begins. I’m already taking a risk ignoring Marcus’s request. I might as well take advantage of this bravery while it lasts.
The knot in my gut unwinds as his arms come up around me. The scent of snow fills my nose, and his cheek is cool against mine. It makes me wonder what it’d be like to experience the winter chill of Fiordenkill. I’ve only seen glimpses of it through the open door in the caves below the inn, but I imagine snow-cloaked mountains, ice shining over lakes, castles with fires glimmering in their windows. With the exception of Havenfall as a safe zone, Byrnisians and Fiordens can’t travel outside their worlds without deteriorating, and humans can’t visit Fiordenkill or Byrn for more than an hour or so. People have tried to make it before, and the books say it’s a horrible way to die—like drowning.
But it’s not impossible. Once, when I was a little kid, a Byrnisian runner made it as far as Telluride before collapsing. Marcus had to send in a cleanup crew with bribes and berry wine to ply the skiers who’d seen a scaled man dying in the snow. I daydream, sometimes, that someone will find a way around our bodies’ limits. About seeing Fiordenkill at Brekken’s side.
Brekken pulls back, his hands on my arms, and looks at me with warm eyes that shift into concern as they travel over my face.
“Maddie,” he says, his voice soft and low. “Can we go somewhere else? Alone?”
I nod, something fizzy as champagne bubbling through me. “Took you long enough. Let’s get out of here.”
5
After delivering Marcus’s bottle of champagne from his office, Brekken and I make it out of the inn unnoticed, another bottle of wine clutched in Brekken’s long fingers. We slink through the gardens and into the barn, past a few shiny cars and Taya’s motorcycle. I laugh out loud when a snort from the chestnut mare makes Brekken jump back.
“It’s just a horse.”
“We don’t have these back home.” Brekken looks indignantly at me, then stretches a cautious hand up to pat the animal’s cheek. He’s clearly doing it for my benefit, and I have to choke back another laugh as the horse snorts and he flinches. “They’re so … large.”
“Says the boy whose army rides giant wolves around,” I tease.
“Our wolves aren’t nearly this big. And they don’t have sharp hooves.”
I swallow a laugh. I shouldn’t be uncharitable—I know that in centuries past, Fiordenkill was at war with Tural, a world peopled by centaurs. You can still find the odd hoofprint in some of the caves beneath the inn. But that world was closed off sometime in the 1700s, so it’s hard to take Brekken’s fear seriously.
“You and I have very different ideas of what’s dangerous.”
I think again of the Silver Prince’s words as I go to the ladder that leads to the barn loft and climb up, reaching a second floor filled with hay. The walls are covered with rakes and old harrows and tools I don’t know the purpose of. A hole in the roof reveals the night sky. I swear there are somehow more stars above Havenfall than there are elsewhere, and the moon always seems to hang low. As if the heavenly bodies can sense the doorways at Havenfall and are huddling in close, hoping to catch a breeze from another world.
As I plop down on a hay bale and wait for Brekken, it occurs to me why Marcus and I disagree. We, too, have different ideas of what constitutes danger. Marcus thinks it’s Havenfall, the soldiers and swords, cliffs and deep pools, the doorways in the cellar, the current of politics that simmers beneath everything, even as all the delegates drink and laugh together. And maybe that is dangerous. But not nearly as dangerous as staying in Sterling would be. I hate how everyone looks at me like I’m about to break or explode, making it feel like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nothing is as dangerous as the loneliness that wraps around me sometimes, as cold and real as an iron manacle.