Havenfall (Havenfall #1)(69)

She takes the broken bracelet but not the bait. “You could leave too,” she says softly. “Leave right now, with me. We can figure it out—”

I make my voice as icy as I can. “Not in a million years. This is my home. If you want to go, go.”

Taya’s face goes white, her mouth flat.

“Maybe I will,” she says, and turns and walks from the clearing.





18

After a few hours of restless sleep, I give up and let my feet take me where they want—to the Heiress’s room.

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.”