Blood. I think of the day Graylin, Willow, Enetta, the Prince, and I tested the door with Fiorden magic. How the stone seemed to stir under my bloody fingers.
“He wanted the door open,” I whisper, the pieces of the story shifting in my mind, scraping against each other like tectonic plates. “The Silver Prince wanted chaos at Havenfall. So he could take over the inn. He must have known Bram was Solarian. He knew what it would look like when we found the body.”
Brekken’s mouth becomes a flat line. I see the faintest shimmer of anger in his eyes. “What about Marcus?” he asks. “Surely your uncle wouldn’t let that happen.”
My heart and stomach sink together. “You haven’t heard. Marcus is … ill. He’s been unconscious since that night.”
Brekken’s mouth dropped open. “How? What happened?”
Tears burn at my eyes. “We thought a Solarian had gotten him, eaten his soul.” I look down, like I could see right through the floorboards to the first floor and into the ballroom with the Solarian’s cage. I imagine the fiery eyes I saw in the woods fixed on me, sending shivers down my spine. “But I don’t think that makes sense anymore.”
Brekken follows my gaze. “There’s another Solarian, isn’t there?”
“Yes, but that one didn’t come through until the next day. Whatever happened to Marcus happened that first night.”
Brekken blinks, leaning his head against mine. Tiredness tugs my body down, like the Silver Prince has turned up the gravity for the whole inn. I wish I could wrap my arms around Brekken and both of us sink down into the mattress, sleep until this whole mess has magically fixed itself.
“The Heiress always says the Innkeeper is bound to the inn,” Brekken says, his words slow and halting. Curled against him, I feel the vibrations in his chest as he speaks “Maybe the Solarian door opening impacted him somehow.”
“We don’t know how to close it,” I whisper. “Graylin has been trying to heal Marcus with the black market magic, but it’s not working.”
Brekken’s body stiffens abruptly. Surprised, I sit up and look at him, in time to see the color flooding from his face.
“What’s wrong?”
“I …”
For the first time tonight, maybe the first time ever, Brekken looks totally at a loss. He runs his hands through his hair, looks around at my darkening room, as if the answers he seeks are written on the walls.
Sick dread settles into me.
“I learned something about the black market when I was in Fiordenkill,” he whispers. “The Heiress just wanted to keep the objects safe. To keep magic out of the hands of people who would abuse it. She wanted to bring all the silver back to Havenfall. But she didn’t know … there was a reason your uncle was selling the objects, Maddie.”
The cold spreads up through my chest and limbs. “Brekken, what is it?”
“Marcus was trying to save the Solarians,” he says. “They’re not beasts, Maddie. They’re people.”
As his words sink into me, I brace myself for the shock to hit. But it doesn’t. And I realize on some level, I already knew.
“What about the sealed door? The treaty?” I whisper. But I don’t need Brekken to answer that either. There has always been war; that doesn’t make us all monsters.
Brekken shakes his head. “I don’t know what really happened in that fight,” he answers. “But the door closing trapped innocent Solarians in all the worlds, and traders in Byrn and Fiordenkill and Haven are still taking advantage. Capturing them, stealing their magic. That’s who Marcus was trying to save.”
He takes a harsh breath. “Because the Solarians are dying. Because every time a Solarian binds magic to matter, a piece of them is bound too. There’s a word—selu—it means soul, spirit, their essence, whatever you want to call it. There are kidnapped Solarians all over the Adjacent Realms, binding magic—and themselves—to things, and it’s killing them.”
He stands, paces, and I stand too, panic filtering slowly through every cell in my body.
His voice cracks, shadows flickering in his eyes. Whatever he saw in Fiordenkill, it’s clearly ripping him apart inside. “Marcus would track down these objects and ‘sell’ them to safe houses, where the mercenaries couldn’t track them. Then the hosts …”
Hosts. Mom? My fists clench, nails pressing into palms.
“Somehow the hosts would release the selu and put the Solarians back together,” Brekken finishes. “I don’t know how. I didn’t know any of this until the night I left. The Heiress thought—she told me—we were righting Marcus’s wrongs.”
His voice sounds distant, like we’re standing on opposite sides of a chasm. And yet it’s close, too, closer than breath, closer than my own thoughts. Like he’s speaking from inside my chest.
Because didn’t I know? Didn’t I know that it cost Sura to enchant just that little spoon, to give me the magic that would save my life? The object is heavy in my pocket now. Does it contain a sliver of her soul? Did she part with a piece of herself for my sake?
But before I can explain everything that’s coming together in my head, there’s a pounding at my bedroom door, and then it bursts open by force, slamming violently against the wall.
“Traitor!”
Brekken whirls around as three Byrnisian soldiers materialize in my doorway. The seconds go by in stop motion, slow and hyper-fast all at once. They’re inside before I can even form a thought, hauling Brekken back, wrenching his arms behind him.
“Take him to the tunnels,” a cool voice says.
The soldiers drag Brekken away, his eyes are boring into mine, and then the Silver Prince is standing in front of me in my otherwise empty room. I feel out of my body again, like maybe nothing is real.
“You still love him,” the Prince observes.
There’s no warmth in his voice, no emotion at all, just a detached, almost academic curiosity. There’s none of the compassion he showed me when we spoke at Marcus’s bedside. Or the closeness—or was it flirting?—in the observatory. This is the Silver Prince from the books in the library. And something comes back to me, distant and quiet, but carried on the currents of adrenaline from this morning’s murder attempt. He told me that not everyone has good intentions.
Eerie calm descends over me. I have to lie.
“I didn’t know he was coming back,” I say.
“It looks like you were glad to see him.”
“Good thing I held him here for you,” I retort, refusing to give him an inch.
There’s the note of a challenge there, but the Silver Prince doesn’t call me on it. Just smiles, faintly.
“Perhaps you’re developing better judgment, then. I wondered, when I saw that staffer flee. Taya?”
Cold seizes my heart, and I flinch before I can stop myself. “What does she have to do with anything?”
Is he angry I didn’t dose Taya with forgetting-wine? How does he even know her name?
“She is a liar,” the Prince says with an icy smile. “Call it an intuition. Rule long enough, and you’ll understand. You’re young—it’s all right to have trusted wrong.”