“We’ll get to the bottom of this,” he says in the Silver Prince’s direction. “I swear it. We’ll run the summit until Marcus wakes up, and the other delegates and staff don’t need to learn what’s happened here tonight.”
The Prince turns and gives him a long look, but still nods. “Very well. As long as Madeline is the one making decisions if Marcus is unable, leading Havenfall.”
All the air seems to vacate itself from my chest. I understand why the inn needs a neutral leader, but when the Silver Prince puts it that way—
Lead Havenfall. My mind races, circling around the words. Just for tonight, but still. It’s almost more than I can process.
“Whatever we do,” the Silver Prince says after a few stretching moments, “we must begin now.”
Graylin says tersely, “I agree,” and then glances at me. Waiting, I realize, for me to weigh in.
“Sounds good,” I say. “I mean, yes. Start now. Let’s do it.”
Ugh. Whatever a leader of Havenfall sounds like, it isn’t that.
“I have to attend to my people,” the Prince says, gliding toward the door. He glances toward Marcus with a strange expression on his face. It’s worry, sort of, but not for my uncle—for what his condition means for the Prince. For Byrnisians. For Havenfall.
Then he’s gone.
It crosses my mind to worry about him, alone in the tunnels with more Solarians potentially on the loose. But that’s silly; I have the feeling he’ll be protecting us, not the other way around. I push off the desk and turn to look down at Marcus again, avoiding looking at the Solarian and its blood. We’ll have to do something about that, but first—“Should we take him to the hospital?” I ask, indicating my uncle. My voice breaks.
Graylin’s dark skin has gone sallow. He shakes his head a little. “I healed all his physical injuries. The rest is magically inflicted. The humans won’t be able to do anything.”
Helplessness seeps through my chest. I nod, trying not to let my lip tremble, but I can’t stop it. The bravado I found when the Silver Prince was in the room has deserted me now that it’s just us.
Graylin notices, his eyes snapping up to me, and his brow smooths out. “Oh, Maddie,” he murmurs, stepping forward to wrap me in a much-needed embrace.
“It’ll be all right,” he says into my hair. “Think of it as practice for when you inherit Havenfall for real someday.”
Tears slip free and crawl down my cheeks. I know I shouldn’t be worrying about myself at all right now, not when there could be Solarians on the grounds. But to be told to lead the inn at such a moment—I feel so small, so childish and unprepared. I expect to feel like this in Sterling, but not at Havenfall. Never at Havenfall.
“What if Marcus doesn’t wake up?” I say through a sniffle.
“He will,” Graylin says firmly. “But in the meantime, he’d want you to be in charge. You don’t have to be perfect, Maddie, but you’re ready.”
“I don’t know about that,” I whisper, smiling to try to trick myself into bravery. Because it seems like I don’t have much of a choice. Even so, I appreciate Graylin’s belief in me.
He loops his arms beneath Marcus’s shoulders and knees and lifts him up, and I feel myself flinch. Even though Graylin is strong and gentle, it’s still unsettling to see Marcus carried like a corpse, his head tipping back, slivers of his blue irises showing through his lashes. A memory flashes through me of Marcus spinning me around by my hands in the ballroom when I was a little kid, making me feel weightless. Even through what happened to Nate and Mom, Marcus always seemed invulnerable to me, the happy king of this little kingdom. He’s my only family on Mom’s side, not counting her. I can’t lose Marcus. I can’t.
“Wait here until I get him settled, will you?” Graylin says. “Then I can take you back upstairs.”
“What about …” I glance without meaning to toward the Solarian corpse, wrapped in the carpet.
Graylin’s smile, already weak, flickers out. “I’ll come back later and bury it.”
I wonder if we’ll ever get the blue bloodstains out of the rug. A short laugh escapes me, because it’s such a trivial thing to worry about, and yet in my exhaustion it seems important. Marcus will come out of this soon, and I want him to see that I’ve kept this place shipshape in his absence.
We need to get rid of the body.
And I don’t want to be in the tunnels alone.
“Let me help,” I tell Graylin. “Please.”
I walk a little ahead of Graylin on the way back to their suite, in case I need to head off any delegates out for a late-night stroll—we can’t let anyone see Marcus like this. But the first person we pass in the hall is Willow as she brings a handful of security staff down the hall toward the Solarian doorway. She stares worriedly at Marcus but doesn’t stop to chat.
I know that the team trailing her—the security team—is part of Havenfall’s staff, but I almost never see them. They’re stationed out in the woods usually, and the sight of them all gathered together makes everything feel even more dire somehow. These aren’t the dissolute college kids I saw in the common room earlier. They’re muscled, silent men and women, dressed in black with pistols at their hips. But, I worry they might not be enough.
Eventually Graylin and I get Marcus to their room and settled into bed. He’s still out cold, and Graylin takes a moment to hit him with another round of healing magic, though I can tell Graylin’s tiring. When we step back out into the second-floor corridor, Graylin locks the bedroom door behind him, and I don’t know, I don’t ask, if it’s to keep threats out or Marcus in.
Because now we have to deal with the body.
With Graylin at my side, his head on a swivel for anything amiss, I go upstairs to a supply closet where Marcus stashes all the random crap that delegates and staff forget here every summer. It doesn’t take long to find what I’m looking for: a giant, smelly duffel bag that seems to be meant for ski equipment of some kind. I send a silent apology to whoever it belongs to as I roll it up and tuck it under my arm.
Outside, the night—almost dawn now—is beautiful as usual for Havenfall. The air is pleasantly warm with just a touch of a cool breeze, the sky is spattered with stars, and a bouquet of night scents float on the wind—fresh water, pine, soil, and stone. The songs of crickets and frogs fill the air, blending with the soft rustling of pines. But it seems darker than usual, the shadows misshapen and looming. Every twig that snaps beneath our feet makes me jump and hold the shovel tighter, my heart hammering so hard it hurts. Little moonlight makes it through the trees, and Graylin is just a dark shape ahead of me, the bulging duffel bag slung over his shoulder distorting his silhouette. I don’t want the Solarian’s body anywhere near the inn, but still, every step we take away from the lights of Havenfall’s windows seems weighted with more and more danger.
I don’t do much of the actual burial—mostly just standing nearby to make sure we’re alone while Graylin digs the hole, then helping him fill in the pit—but it’s still an ugly, brutal business. The sound of shovel hitting dirt, and then dirt hitting flesh, makes me flinch and my stomach roil. Suddenly, as I go to drop a blade full of dirt into the blackness, my stomach heaves and the shovel falls from my fingers.