Havenfall (Havenfall #1)(63)

“What the hell was that?” Taya asks in a low, husky voice that shows she’s scared.

Graylin looks at me. “The doorways.”



Graylin, Taya, and I rush down to find chaos in the tunnels. Fiorden and Byrnisian delegates swarm the juncture, the lamps on the walls barely enough to illuminate them, so it appears at first like just one seething ocean of bodies. Shouts echo off the stone, layering over each other until it’s all a jumbled mass of sound and panic. I want to hide away somewhere, curled up with my hands over my ears, until this is all over. But I can’t. I can’t.

“They’re going through! The Fiordens are going through!” someone screams when we stop in the entrance tunnel.

A knot of Fiordens at the front of the crowd has clustered around the tunnel mouth to their world, shouting at Sal, who they’ve pressed up against the stone wall. A few of the soldiers who joined yesterday’s hunt have gone farther down and formed a line across the hallway, weapons drawn, as if to catch anything that might come from around the bend of the tunnel and the Solarian door past it. Through the tangle of noise, words and phrases float to my ears.

You can’t keep us here.

Let us pass!

Graylin has his hand on my arm, protective, but I pull free and dart through the crowd, panic making my ears buzz, requiring that I move. I can’t hang back and watch this. I throw elbows until I’m at the front of the crowd and step up in the gap next to Sal, turning to face the Fiordens’ wrathful gazes. The door is not far behind us. An aching, cold, snow-scented breeze plays at my back, ghosting over the nape of my neck. Like it’s beckoning me through, inviting me to step across to a world where I might freeze to death in a matter of minutes, but at least that’s better than getting torn open by a Solarian’s claws and teeth. Or an angry crowd. I wonder where Brekken is now, somewhere in that cold universe.

I don’t know what I’m going to say, but I have to say something, because when I raise my hand, the crowd quiets all at once. I feel their eyes on me like heat-seeking missiles. Marcus would know what to do, what to say. But he isn’t here. Just Sal. And me.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Mads,” he says under his breath.

“Delegates,” I begin, willing my voice not to shake. Then I realize that wasn’t loud enough, so I try again. “Delegates. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the door to Solaria. I feared exactly this.”

Silence. I see Graylin’s face and Taya’s at the far end of the tunnel, but the crowd is pressed too tightly for them to come forward.

“I get that you’re scared,” I say. “I’m scared too. And with my uncle sick, I haven’t made all the right choices. But the last time Solarians threatened Havenfall, we beat them by coming together—”

“Not before the ice lovers allied with them!” someone shouts, using a derogatory Byrnisian nickname for Fiordens.

An angry ripple cuts through the crowd, and I see hostile glances shooting from face to face like wildfire, like infection. Tension churns in the air.

“That was over a century ago,” I say, trying for calm. “I know the Fiorden delegation is as committed to peace as any of us. Aren’t they?”

That last bit comes out with the hint of a challenge, directed at the Fiordens gathered around us as we block the door. The courtier Nessa is closest, and I hold her gaze, my head high. For a second I think I’ve convinced them, that I’ve won.

Then Nessa draws her sword—her pretty jeweled sword that I always thought was just ornamental—and lunges for the doorway.

Sal shoves me out of the way, his extender baton coming out just in time to meet the sword with a sharp crack. The people around us barge ahead, though, and when Sal spins one way to counter Nessa’s blow, a middle-aged delegate darts behind him.

The door ripples and there’s a fwoom sound like a drumbeat at the bottom of the range of human hearing, and a blast of icy air and starlight, and the delegate is gone.

That’s all it takes. Nessa’s sword flashes and blood flies; Sal cries out and stumbles back, clutching his shoulder.

The clatter of his baton on the stone floor opens the floodgates.

Everyone surges forward at once, and I grab on to the rough stone wall to avoid being pushed through the Fiorden doorway. Bodies shove past me, indistinguishable in the rush and the noise. People shout and scream in three languages. I yell at them to stop, but no one hears me; if it weren’t for the scrape in my throat and lungs I wouldn’t be sure I was speaking at all. I can’t move, can scarcely breathe. I don’t know what to do.

Then lightning—lightning—branches across the top of the tunnel, searing my vision, leaving a forked trail of light behind my eyes. Heat scalds my upturned face, and the boom an instant later resonates in my chest and sends dust raining down. The noise dies at once, as suddenly as if someone pressed a mute button; everyone turns to the top of the tunnel, where the Silver Prince stands silhouetted against the light of the upstairs hallway.

In the still and the silence, I notice that the crowd is thinner. Some people are on the ground; some people are hunched and trembling; some people are gone. In the panic, how many people went through to Fiordenkill?

“Enough,” the Silver Prince calls, and his voice echoes the thunder. His gaze finds me and he beckons. “Madeline.”