Havenfall (Havenfall #1)(77)
Sunlight and air scald my face, my eyes. I drag the air down, coughing and spitting in my effort to get as much in my lungs as will fit. Above the wild drumbeat of my heart in my ears, I hear the growl of a motor, and I turn around in time to see the station wagon disappear over the crest of the road, gravel spraying in its wake. The sky above, framed by treetops and ice-capped mountains, has never looked so blue or so beautiful.
I tread water for a minute to make sure he’s gone, and then swim for shore, my teeth chattering as the remnants of terror and adrenaline work their way through me. I crawl up the gravel slope, under the bridge where no one will see me, and pull my legs to my chest, trying to breathe, trying to think. The lake and the woods are calm and quiet, ill suited to the storm of fear and rage and confusion rampaging inside me.
The Solarian girl. The Byrnisian man. Whit, shoving me off the bridge like a sack of unwanted kittens. The knowledge that if I were underwater for a minute longer, I would have passed out, I would be dead.
My arms still smart from whatever happened in the water. I push my remaining sleeve up and look down at my skin, expecting to see redness and burns. But instead it’s pale, covered in goose bumps, unharmed except for a blossoming bruise around my wrists from pulling against the tape. The tape itself is gone. My phone is gone, somewhere at the bottom of the lake probably. But something else presses into my bicep from underneath the rolled-up sleeve. I reach in and extract it.
A spoon. The one the girl in the antique shop gave me.
It’s still warm, almost hot in my hands. I can feel the thrum of magic still within it. I didn’t use it all to escape my binds. I think back to Sura crouching over it. Wait …
Another chill, one that has less to do with the cold, rips through me, my teeth clattering together. She looked so human. But if I’m right, only one people have binding magic. Solarians.
I left her there. Left her in that cellar. I remember how her eyes drooped, how she shuddered when she enchanted the spoon, like it took all her strength. Like it took something out of her.
Not the enemy, something in me whispers.
Solarians are cunning, I remind myself. They were members of the summit, until they weren’t. I shouldn’t feel pity for one. But she gave me the spoon. The spoon that somehow ignited underwater and tore through my bindings.
And besides—it wasn’t a Solarian who gave the order to kill me.
I stare at the twin images of Havenfall before me, the real thing and the one reflected in Mirror Lake. Taya’s plea from yesterday echoes in my mind.
Leave right now, with me.
But even though everything is so terribly wrong, the inn still calls to me. Omphalos. Where else would I ever go?
A Byrnisian delegate, a woman named Kel, is standing guard at the front door when I trudge out of the woods. She’s traded in her delegate fashion, though, for military dress, wearing breastplates made of overlapping, gleaming red scales over a loose black tunic and leggings. Her hand goes to her sword hilt when I come out of the trees; then I see her recognize me and do a double take.
“Innkeeper?” she says incredulously.
I can’t stop the laugh that bubbles up, scraping my throat painfully on the way out, my vocal cords still raw from my near-death experience. The title feels so false now that I’ve broken a hundred years of tradition and allied with the Silver Prince. And by the looks of it, he’s already flexing his new authority. I think about the man in the antique shop again; I commit his features to memory. What will it mean if the Silver Prince knows him? If he doesn’t?
All I want to do is take a long, hot shower and then sleep for a week. Or sit down with Graylin and Willow, spill everything, and let them tell me what to do next. But I’m not a little kid anymore, and these problems won’t go away by dumping them on the grown-ups to fix. This is on me.
As I run, drenched and shaking, up the stairs, the only thing I can think is: this is royally messed up. Twisted beyond all reason.
When I open my door, the room beyond is dark and still, just as I left it. But no—something is off. A presence, a movement in the darkness, like a cold wind over my skin. I thought I was all out of fear, but it roars back up, I’m plummeting again. I grab blindly for the light switch but it’s too late. A hand closes around my mouth, stifling a scream.
The door slams behind me and suddenly, my back is against the wall, and I’m staring into a familiar set of eyes.
Brekken.
22
The world seems to go absolutely still. Like my heart has stopped beating, my nerves stopped firing. Brekken looks sharper than when I last saw him, harsher. Like the intervening days have carved away at him, leaving his cheeks hollow, his eyes burning. His clothes are dirt-stained, his hair damp, color high in his cheeks.
“What have you done, Maddie?” he whispers, toneless. His hands are on my arms, not tight, but tense, like I might fight him off. Should I fight him off? I stare at him, unable to reconcile the clash of feelings rushing up in me.
On the one hand, there’s the fear, the anger—he lied to me. I was so wrong to trust him. And yet relief and joy are welling up too. He’s safe, he’s here. I blink hard, swallowing, trying desperately to catch up with the current moment. “You came back.”
“Because you broke off the alliance.” There’s anguish in his voice, and anger too, simmering beneath the surface. He smells like ice. Instinct tells me to defend myself, explain. That’s what the Maddie of a week ago would have done. But instead I step away, outrage prickling along my skin. “A lot has happened since you left. What have you even been doing?”