The inside of my head is an obstacle course, full of things that I don’t want to think about and yet can’t avoid, each collision a fresh jolt of pain. Brekken’s disappearance, the fight with Taya, what she said about Max. The silver trade and the fact that Marcus is still unconscious, or the Silver Prince’s claim that Marcus made a deal with a Solarian and invited it into our home the day Nate died and Mom’s and my lives fell apart. Whatever the Heiress knows about all this, I need to know too. Maybe it has something to do with the HOSTS list?
When the Heiress’s door opens under my knock, she doesn’t seem surprised to see me. She stands back to let me pass, and I crash into one of her fluffy armchairs, pull my knees up and wrap my arms around them.
Images flash through my mind: the crowd and the chaos in the tunnels, the bright glimpse of Fiordenkill and the shudder of magic as the delegates scrambled through, the Silver Prince standing in Marcus’s room and telling me to make a choice. And Taya turning her back on me, the mud and moonlight in her hair as she walked away. It feels like there’s something sitting on my chest, getting heavier and heavier every minute, making it hard to move.
The Heiress lets me be for a while, puttering around the room and putting away her silver trinkets, tucking them in cabinets and shutting them in drawers.
“I heard what happened in the tunnels,” she says, looking sidelong toward me as she lines up rings in a velvet-lined box. Her face and voice are carefully neutral. “I felt the disturbance. The … unbalance.”
My face burns with the memory of it. How I stood paralyzed and watched the Silver Prince fix the problem I couldn’t.
“A third of the Fiordenkill delegates are gone. I—”
My voice breaks, and I put my head down on my knees, not really wanting to share this with the Heiress, but needing to tell someone. “Marcus would have never let this happen.”
Even as the words escape, though, the question of guilt twists my insides again. Can I still look up to Marcus, if what the Silver Prince said is true? If my brother is dead partly because of him?
Partly because of me too.
The Heiress comes over and lowers herself into the chair across from me. “Marcus isn’t here,” she says, gentleness and sternness playing tug-of-war with her words. “When he wakes, maybe he can explain everything to us. All the choices he’s made. But until then, we must make choices of our own as we see fit.”
I hear what she’s saying to me. There’s no use wallowing. Get up and face the music. And she’s right. But I can’t. I feel like the weight of four worlds is pressing in on me from all directions, trapping me here in this chair, motionless, useless.
The ledger, the one I know carries my mother’s name, sits on the polished desk. I nod toward it. “Marcus’s records say my mother was a host,” I say, trying to stop my voice from shaking. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.” A silver chain still sits draped over a molded porcelain hand on a side table, and she plucks it up, drawing it meditatively through her fingers. “I know she held magical objects for Marcus. Bought and sold them. But ‘host’ does seem an odd word to use, doesn’t it.” She lifts her eyes to mine. “Have you spoken to your mother about this?”
I shake my head. The thought did cross my mind. It’s Wednesday, visiting day at Sterling Correctional Facility. I could take Marcus’s jeep and be there in a few hours. But I can’t leave Havenfall in so much chaos, and more than that, the idea of facing my mother’s dead eyes on top of everything else right now feels unbearable. I used to love her mismatched eyes. I wished I had one green one like her, instead of two plain brown ones.
I ask the Heiress, “Do you think she was in on whatever Marcus was doing?”
The Heiress shakes her head, eyes sad. “I couldn’t say.”
“The Silver Prince told me my uncle was making deals with Solarians.” The words rush out of me. “He said Marcus invited one into our house. The one that killed Nathan.”
“No one knew how dangerous they were back then,” the Heiress says gently, and I think of Taya last night, questioning if they were dangerous at all. “For centuries they attended the summit with the rest of us. You can still visit the abandoned wing and see proof of that. If Marcus had sympathy for them, he wasn’t the only one.” She sighs. “But then things changed. As they always do. Even then, Marcus still thought they were like us. He believed they were misunderstood and should be saved, not banished. But as Innkeeper, it was his job to be neutral … at least in public.”
“It just seems so hard to believe.” I rub my eyes—I don’t have any tears left to cry, but they still ache somehow. “And that doesn’t explain why she and Marcus never told me about any of this, afterward.”
“They may have felt guilty,” the Heiress says. “Or perhaps they felt it would put you in danger if you knew. I don’t agree with everything your uncle has done, Maddie, but I know he loves you. Your mother too.”
But the words feel hollow when they land in my chest. I want to believe the Heiress, but I can’t. With so much chaos and blood around us, I can’t give my family a free pass. I cast around for a change of subject.
“The book you’re writing,” I say finally. “Is it really a history of Havenfall?”
The Heiress laughs softly and shakes her head. “No,” she says. “No, that is not my book to write. Maybe it will be yours, someday.”
“Then what are you working on? When you’ve had all those people up here for interviews?”
“Magic.” The Heiress lets the silver chain slip through her fingers and pool in her palm. “I want to know the nature of it, how it manifests across the worlds. Fiordens have their healing and natural gifts; Byrnisians have control over the elements; Solarians have their shapeshifting. Some of that magic has been bound up in these objects.”
She leans forward and lets the necklace fall, a slipstream of silver between her fingers. She catches it at the last moment and leans back. “But I don’t know how. All these objects—they’ve been at Havenfall for as long as anyone can remember, or Marcus or I have brought them back from elsewhere. I don’t know how they’re created. I’ve never seen one made. I believe there must have been a people, from one of the worlds now closed off, who had the power to bind magic to matter. But I don’t know which one.”
I think of the tunnel, the dozens of dead doorways, dark portals leading nowhere. “How will you ever find out, if the people are gone?”
Her eyes flit back and forth between me and the necklace. “I don’t know if I will. History, even the history I was there to witness, slides quickly out of my grasp when there is no one else to remember it with me. And now I’m trying to write about something I haven’t even seen; everything I know comes to me secondhand.”
She smiles, though it’s more sad and tired than genuine. “Things would be much easier if your Brekken were still here, you know. He was supposed to be making the trades while I stayed here and did the research. Now I have to go down into town tomorrow and deal with that dreadful man …”
My Brekken. The words sink into my heart like a fishhook and tug. I know now that he was fighting a good fight. Working with the Heiress to bring the magical objects safely back to the inn. But the hurt of my stolen keys is still raw, tangled up with my shock and disbelief that Marcus would allow the black market to fester. And I don’t know if I’ll ever even see Brekken again. In the roller coaster of the last few days, that hasn’t really sunk in—but now it hits me, all at once. He’s my best friend. I love him, and he’s gone.