Havenfall Read online

  To everyone who’s ever felt like they don’t have a place

  CONTENTS

  A Brief Introduction to the Adjacent Realms

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Acknowledgments

  A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO THE ADJACENT REALMS

  Fiordenkill

  Most of Fiordenkill is encased in ice and frost. Ethereal in its beauty, Fiordenkill sparkles with ice bridges and palaces of packed snow. It seldom sees the sun, but the sky is bright with auroras and thousands of stars. Soldiers ride on wolves and great bears roam the woods; enchanted fruit grows on the trees, immune to the frost encasing their bright skins.

  Compared to people of other worlds, Fiordens are thought to be noble and stoic and sometimes secretive. Fiordenkill magic can heal flesh and make plants grow.

  Byrn

  The massive world of Byrn swelters under the heat of two suns and three moons. Enormous, long-lived storms batter the deserts, the roiling seas, and the lightning plains, so that the ground seems to shift constantly beneath one’s feet. Millennia of elemental magic, unleashed without care for the consequences, have ravaged the world and left most of it uninhabitable to Byrnisians.

  Years ago, the Silver Prince used his immense magic to tame the storms and erect a wall around his city-state, Oasis. Ever since, he has ruled in peace, keeping the storms at bay. Almost everyone living in Byrn resides within the city walls, having agreed to cease all elemental wielding—except for the nomads who remain outside and brave the lightning, hurricanes, and burning wind to keep their magic.

  Solaria

  Little is known about Solaria, a tiny, sealed-off world that is a hotbed of powerful, highly volatile magic. It’s thought that the people of Solaria are largely responsible for our world’s mythologies around djinni, demons, and vampires. Some call them soul-devourers. It’s been said that Solaria has no visible sun but instead has a blazing golden sky. Though Solarians can take many shapes, their beast forms all bleed dark blue blood.

  The doorway to Solaria was sealed off years ago after a deadly incident that took place at Havenfall. Solarians are no longer welcome at the inn and they are not part of the Peace Treaty alliance of the Last Remaining Adjacent Realms. There are rumors that Solarians snuck into the other realms before the door was closed, and that they still roam the worlds.

  Haven

  Haven is what we know as the human world. It is the only realm without natural magic, which is why the people of other realms call it Haven—a safe place, a neutral place. The existence of other worlds have been kept secret from humankind. This is the number one rule that all the Realms must abide by. Humans can’t live in the other Realms. Their biology prevents them from surviving conditions outside of Haven for more than a few hours.

  Omphalos: The Inn at Havenfall

  All the realms intersect at Havenfall, through a series of doorways connected by tunnels hidden beneath the Rocky Mountains. These doorways have been guarded by us Innkeepers for as long as anyone can remember. There is a radius around the doorways within which people from all realms can breathe safely and not sicken, as people usually do in worlds not their own.

  The Inn at Havenfall was built on this spot as was the town of Haven—so named because, to the people of the realms, the town and the inn represent our whole world.

  There used to be many more worlds accessible from the inn, but over the centuries some doorways have closed due to the inscrutable forces that govern the realms. Only the doorway to Solaria has been sealed shut on purpose, for the protection of the Last Remaining Adjacent Realms.

  The Annual Peace Summit

  On the longest day of our year, Fiordens witness a blazing, multicolored aurora in their dark sky and Byrn undergoes a simultaneous eclipse of its three moons. This is the solstice. On this day every summer, travelers can pass safely through the doorways into the Inn at Havenfall—the neutral realm that serves as host to them all.

  During this special time, the inn holds its annual peace summit, where delegates from all the realms negotiate trade and political agreements by day and dance in the ballroom by night to celebrate the diversity and unity of all the inn’s guests.

  PROLOGUE

  The first breath of air Marcus takes in another realm feels like lightning. Human lungs aren’t built for this world, for Byrn. He doesn’t know how long he has before they give up and he needs to stagger back through the shining doorway to Haven.

  But every new Innkeeper is duty-bound to visit all the remaining worlds, if only once—that’s what his great-grandmother, Annabelle, who ran the Inn at Havenfall for almost a century, told him before she died. So Marcus doesn’t flinch, not with twenty nobles of Byrn lined up in a semicircle around the portal, waiting with scaled cheekbones glittering in the orange light. All of them are gathered, curious to hear the new portal-keeper speak. Behind them, clusters of metallic buildings shimmer against a sky the color of flame.

  Havenfall is all celebration, all pomp and ritual and freely flowing spirits, in stark contrast to this intense formality. Now is Marcus’s time. The book he brought with him is heavy in his hands.

  He will only read one page. There is more to the peace treaty that he won’t have time to recite: the names of the delegates who died at the inn when the Solarians rioted; the decree to forever seal the gateway to Solaria with old magic; Havenfall’s promise to hunt down all of those who escaped. A reminder to Haven, Fiordenkill, and Byrn that even after nearly a hundred years, rogue Solarians still roam their realms.

  Some still blame humans, blame Haven, for the bloodshed. Marcus knows that. It’s now his responsibility, as the portal-keeper, to keep everyone safe. Not just the Byrnisians and Fiordens, but his beloved Graylin; Marcus’s sister, Sylvia; and her children—who will one day inherit the Inn at Havenfall and all that comes with it.

  He must remind everyone of their promises to one another. So he lifts the book, the only time this leather-bound volume has ever left the inn’s library, and begins to read aloud from its old, crumbling pages—to tell the waiting crowd that Havenfall remembers.

  BYRN, FIORDENKILL, AND HAVEN WITH THIS INSTRUMENT ENTER TOGETHER IN ACCORD.

  Let it be known that the representatives of Byrn, Fiordenkill, and Haven are allied in peace and hereby set themselves against the warlike land and denizens of Solaria.

  Access, trade, and political or civilian interaction between Solaria and any of the other connected realms, including Haven, are forbidden; any infraction of this law is considered treasonous and punishable as such; as agreed to by the newly Allied Realms of Byrn, Fiordenkill, and Haven, otherwise known as the Last Remaining Adjacent Realms.

  1

  The bus depot in Denver smells like gasoline and asphalt, unwashed bodies and stale coffee. It’s loud with the creak and huff of buses outside, an old speaker system announcing arrival times in between bursts of static, the thud of footsteps as people run to catch their buses. Everything blurs together into white noise, and as long as I
see the mountains out the window, gilded in the afternoon sun, I can imagine I’m somewhere else. The lightning plains of Byrn, or the white deserts the Fiorden delegates have told me about, where the earthquakes are so constant that the land heaves and ripples like a pale sea.

  And even without imagining, this decrepit station, for all its bustle and noise, is better than where I was half an hour ago.

  Better than the sterile chemical smell and hollow, ringing silence of the maximum-security prison where they’ve kept my mother for more than ten years now.

  I stop in front of the arrivals board and hoist my duffel bag higher on my shoulder. I look at the aged screen to try to push the images out of my head. Mom’s face behind the scratched plexiglass, the flat darkness of her eyes. It’s like she doesn’t care, can’t be bothered about what’s going to happen next.

  I blink hard, focus on the places and times flickering above me. Omaha, 2:25.

  That’s the bus I’m supposed to take. The plan is to stay with Grandma Ellen, my dad’s mom, for the summer, and intern at the insurance company she runs. Dad doesn’t want me at the Inn at Havenfall—not now and not ever again. He didn’t understand Mom’s attachment to the place, and he doesn’t get mine either. It’s like he can sense the glimmer of magic clinging to me when I return, and it makes him suspicious. He says I should be doing something I can put on a college application next year.

  And it’s true that Havenfall doesn’t exactly appear in an online search. My working at the inn won’t earn me internship credits anywhere. But these summers are all I have. I’ve been going to the inn for summers since I was six. And the older I get, the more important it is to show Uncle Marcus what I can do, that I can be useful. If all goes well, this time next summer I’ll be traveling to the mountains with more than just a summer bag. Marcus will name me as his inheritor, and I’ll move into the inn for good.

  So, no. Clearly I’m not going to Omaha. A sparkling insurance-sales career is not in my future.

  My insides feel tense, brittle somehow, and my eyes keep drifting back to the blue smudges of mountains outside the windows. Like I’ll fall to pieces if I’m not among them soon. I look back at the arrivals board and scan a few lines down, past Boise and Laramie and Salt Lake City to Haven. 3:50. Gate 8, the last one, at the dusty far end of the depot.

  I glance around the room, where sunlight bounces off the high ceilings. There are only two other people in the waiting area now, a young guy in a hoodie sleeping across four chairs and a middle-aged man with thinning blond hair reading a yellowed newspaper. I go to the far side and sit against the wall on the dingy carpet, next to the outlet that I know from experience is the only one that works, and plug in my phone to let it charge for the long ride.

  I should text Marcus and let him know I’m coming. But when I start to type, a sense of dread fills me. What if he tells me not to come? To listen to my dad? Just the thought is almost unbearable. I lock my screen and put it on the floor facedown, then dig my fingers into my palms. If I just show up, he can’t turn me away. Soon I’ll be there, in my room overlooking the valley, dancing in the ballroom, with Brekken under the stars.

  Going up into the mountains always feels like I’m leaving the rest of the world behind. In the thinner air, it’s as if I’m someone else. I’m Maddie Morrow, Marcus’s trusted niece and maybe inheritor of the Inn at Havenfall, if I play my cards right and impress the delegates from the Adjacent Realms. Not Maddie Morrow, the girl with the dead older brother, the girl with the mom on death row.

  Shit. I didn’t let myself remember those words until now. I got all the way out of Sterling Correctional’s visiting hall, onto the bus on the county road, to the depot, and into this corner before I thought about them. And now the memories flood back in with a rush of nausea. The stares and whispers that follow me everywhere: in the halls at school, at the grocery store, even at home, Dad and his wife, Marla, trailing me with their eyes like any second I might snap, like whatever sickness Mom has lives in me too.

  But Mom is the worst part of it. Her apathy. When the death sentence was first handed down, I thought maybe, just maybe, this would shock her into admitting the truth. That she didn’t kill Nathan eleven years ago. And even if no one but me really believed her, it would be enough to keep her alive.

  But when I sat across from her this morning, the plexiglass between us, she was the same blank face she’s been for eleven years. She just blinked, slowly, when I told her for the thousandth time—I was there. I saw the thing in our house. It came in through the window; I saw the glass on the floor.

  She replied the same as always, too, slow and soft. You were imagining it. We see what we want to see, love, but there are no monsters, just people who do horrible things. I was unbalanced, and I did a horrible thing. Don’t go looking for answers where there are none.

  But that’s not what happened. I know what I saw that night, even if it was only through the crack between two cupboard doors. Before the overhead light shattered, leaving us in shadows, I saw the monstrous dark shape vaulting toward my brother. Heard the roaring sound that filled the kitchen. Then all at once, the screaming stopped and my brother was gone, the kitchen floor slick with blood.

  My mother wasn’t responsible for Nathan’s death; it was a beast from a banished world. And someone, or something, pressured her into taking the blame. Maybe she feared what might happen to Havenfall if she were ever to reveal the truth.

  And what could I do? Because the thing is, you can’t tell people a monster killed your brother. People will start to talk about you. Freak. Liar. Crazy.

  But at Havenfall, people believe me. I’ve only told a few people, but they believe me. I have to hold on to that. It’s all I have.

  I check my phone reflexively, half-afraid that Dad will somehow sense I’m not on the way to Omaha. I’ll update him when it’s too late to turn back. I have only one bar of service, and that’s likely to blink out once we reach the mountains, but it doesn’t matter. All the people I actually want to talk to are up ahead, at the summit in Havenfall. I’ll see them soon, and besides, no one there even knows what a phone is. To them it’s just a strange, glimmering, blinking artifact.

  I grin as a memory from last summer surfaces. I finally wheedled Dad into getting me a smartphone, and my first night at Havenfall, Brekken and I snuck out to the barn and I introduced him to Candy Crush. I wish I had a video of him—serious Brekken, with his soldier’s bearing and noble manners and literally otherworldly cheekbones—hunched over the screen with the tips of his jeweled ears turning red, hissing Fiorden curses whenever he lost a life. I’ve never taken a picture of Brekken, of course. While Marcus doesn’t subject me to the no-phones-on-inn-grounds rule like he does every other human who enters Havenfall, he trusts me not to be stupid. A leaked video could be disastrous, and I’d never endanger my safe place. My birthright. My home.

  Anyway, I don’t need a picture. I’ll see Brekken soon in the flesh.

  At 3:55, the bus to Haven finally pulls up. It looks older than the others, with scratches and rust gathering around the wheels. But my heart still lifts as I climb on board. The driver, a slight, wrinkled man, smiles warmly at me.

  “How you doing today, miss?”

  “Great,” I say with a returning smile as I drop my duffel and slide in a few seats behind him, and I mean it. There’s a smattering of people on the bus—an old woman in the back, bundled up as though it’s winter and not June, a young mother cradling a wailing infant, and the two men from the depot. The engine rattles loudly, and the metal roof above me is dented with what looks like the marks of hailstones.

  It takes us four hours to reach the mountains, and I let myself doze off against the window, sinking into troubled half dreams. I dream Mom and Nate are on the bus beside me, just as they were when we visited Havenfall as kids, my brother fiddling with the silver jacks Marcus gave him when he was born. And my heart leaps for joy.

  But when I say Nathan’s name and they both turn to m
e, I see the prisoner version of Mom, with her baggy tan jumpsuit and listless expression. My brother’s eyes are wide, and I see something reflected in them, a monstrous shadow—

  I’m shaken, grateful when a pothole in the road jars me awake. The sun starts its descent just as we begin to climb into the mountains, painting everything gold. The narrow road hugs a mountainside; to our right are the carved-away stone walls, sometimes covered over with avalanche nets, and to our left, out my window, green pines blanket the valley. In contrast to the sprawl and shine of Denver and its suburbs, the mountains seem like a formidable force against humans, and signs of civilization dwindle rapidly until all we pass are old, half-crumbling mining towns. Decrepit houses and listing trailers are tucked in between the boulders and pines.

  The dream lingers, but I breathe out, imagining it leaving me like smog from my lungs. I crack the window, put on my headphones, and focus on the bite of cool mountain air. Crowns of ice gleam in the sun, and the sky somehow feels bigger framed by the jagged peaks. On the horizon, I can see the translucent curtains of rainfall.

  We’re getting close now.

  Omphalos, I think. A Greek word Marcus taught me. It means navel, technically. The center of everything. Where it all starts. Where it all connects.

  The roads get steep, and the bus sputters and creaks. My music blocks out the worst of it, but I can still feel the bus vibrating around me, like a panting beast of burden, as it climbs up these twisty roads. The metal frame shudders in a way that the worn polyester seat cushion can’t disguise. It doesn’t help that the only thing separating us from dropping off the mountain is a metal railing that doesn’t look like it would withstand a strong gust of wind. For a second, I imagine what it would be like to lose control. To hurtle through the misty air, plunging past the soft blanket of fog and into the yawning forest of darkness below.

  To shatter like glass.

  I blink again and pull out my phone—it’s time to text Uncle Marcus now that we’re getting close. The text goes through, and I hope he sees it amid the bustle of Havenfall’s summit—an annual celebration which is just about to begin that marks the peace between our three worlds.