Havenfall (Havenfall #1)(43)

“Fiorden,” I correct. I fiddle with a hangnail, tugging at it until it hurts. “Clearly I have a habit of trusting the wrong people. Maybe I should just assume that to be the case, going forward.” A bitter chuckle escapes my lips, and a question rises in my mind: do I trust the Prince?

The truthful answer is I don’t know. He’s charming, a little too much so. Slick. But he saved his people. He leads them. If the Byrnisians trust him, what business do I have questioning him? I don’t have any reason not to trust him.

“Okay, here’s the thing.” Taya speaks after a long moment, sounding suddenly, strangely uncomfortable. She looks between the papers and me, as if deciding whether to share something. “I read up on Solarians a bit.” She reaches down and opens the nightstand drawer to reveal a book, hidden where the Bible would be if this were a regular hotel. It’s leather-bound, yellowed, the embossed title reading A History of the Solarian Realm.

“There’s nothing in there about eating people,” she says. “Sucking souls, yeah, but nothing about—you know.” Her nose wrinkles in distaste. “Does it make sense that there would be nothing at all left of the Prince’s bodyguard guy?”

“There was a lot of blood,” I say automatically, thinking about the horrible stickiness on my hands and clothes. But then I remember—it was blue blood, not red. Was there red anywhere? Maybe Sal or Graylin or Willow cleaned the worst of it up before I got to the tunnels?

A shudder rips through me at the thought, as I imagine red blood staining Havenfall ground. Red like in the kitchen that night. We never found Nate’s body either.

I take a deep breath, picturing clean air filling me and shoving the gruesome thoughts away. “The Silver Prince has more reason than anyone to want to find the truth,” I say, maybe a little too fiercely. “Bram was his friend.”

“Okay, it was just a thought.” Taya slips off the bed to pace in front of the window.

“Brekken stole my keys,” I point out.

“We don’t know that for sure.” She gazes out at the mountaintops. “You had them and then you didn’t.”

“And then they were in the Heiress’s room.” I feel my mouth tug down, remembering.

Taya perks up. “Maybe you just dropped them somewhere, or she took them in the ballroom.” She pauses, her eyes far away. “Do you think she opened the door to Solaria?”

I shrug. “I don’t know how she could have. I thought only a Solarian could do it. But it seems like she’s involved somehow.”

And why would she be? Academic curiosity? Some kind of vendetta against Marcus because of whatever they were fighting about last year?

Fear settles cold into my insides, bringing with it the threat of memory—bloody kitchen, broken glass. I don’t want to get sucked in, so I make myself get up and move to the bedside table, where I leaf through the papers we stole from the Heiress’s room.

“Did they say anything else?” I ask, turning to Taya.

Taya raises her eyebrows at me, as if to say, obviously. She perches on the windowsill, her back to the moon and the mountains, her legs swinging off the edge. “I think the Heiress is smuggling something between the Realms.”

I feel colder. “What do you mean? What would she be smuggling?” But the images from inside her room stick in my head. The piles of trinkets, several college educations’ worth of silver just lying around. And the drawers full of cash.

Taya comes over and taps her fingers on the top page of the papers we stole. It looks like something torn out of an old-fashioned ledger, with descriptions of objects written in the Heiress’s careful writing.

Silver teapot with vine handle.

Pendant with silver chain and Byrn-diamond stone.

Plain silver ring.

And so on, with eye-popping amounts of money corresponding on the other side.

That’s not the strangest thing, though. Beside each object is a symbol in green ink, almost like a hieroglyph. As I run my pointer finger over the column, Taya leans over and pulls another sheet of paper out of the pile, flattening it under the lamplight.

“Here’s the key to what that all means.”

Sure enough, the page she’s holding replicates the symbols beside the descriptions of the objects. And—my stomach drops—each one seems to represent a kind of magic from one of the Adjacent Realms. Blood healing—that’s Fiorden. Wind-wielding, rain-calling—Byrnisian. Wakefulness—Fiorden again. And on and on. There have got to be three dozen symbols on this page.

“She’s trading magic,” Taya whispers, almost reverent. “Maybe that’s why she would want the door open? Another world to trade with?”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I mumble, half to myself. Solarians are monsters; surely the Heiress couldn’t be trading with them.

But that’s not right. Whatever can be said about the Solarians, they were once welcome guests at Havenfall alongside the Fiordens and Byrnisians. They participated in the trading of goods between the worlds just like everyone else. They were our allies, right up until the day they turned on us.

But surely the Heiress knows they aren’t to be trusted?

I sit down on the bed, my heart racing, trying to make sense of this. I’ve heard rumors among the delegates of magical objects before—enchanted swords or cups or rings, carrying Adjacent magic inside them. Just like on Earth we have stories of grails or swords pulled from stones. Marcus always dismissed them as old wives’ tales. He insisted Fiorden and Byrnisian magic runs through its people’s blood. It can’t be separated from them.