Page 22

I stood, running my hand over the rough bark of a tree, trying not to look too closely at the girl. Too much time had passed. I needed to return to Clark.

Clark had returned to wait near the entrance to the stone maze, still as a statue with his back to the rocks and a watchful eye on the forest. It took a moment to spot him in the dark of the night, and when I did, it took another moment to recognize him.

Perhaps the shadows played tricks on me, but the Clark before me was not the same as the boy who’d left Haven. It hadn’t been two weeks, yet the never-ending quake in his bones settled, leaving behind a calmness as if nothing in this labyrinth could shake him. He braced a hand on the sword I’d purchased for him as if it were his second skin and flicked his head to right a fallen strand of his red hair.

Clark had always been too tall for his own good, so even when he gained muscle from working for the blacksmith, he still looked like a plank stretched too thin. But the way his shirt had been half-tucked into his trousers, the folds of it laying just right over what muscle he had, it suited him.

I’d been so worried that following me into the labyrinth would ruin him.

The labyrinth didn’t break him. It brought him to life.

Clark placed himself like a shield in front of me to walk.

“The others took a right up ahead. Let’s go.”

It took us less than twenty minutes to find them, and almost took a sword from Ivar before he recognized us.

“Glad you made it. We will go for a few hours more before making camp,”

Harald said, as if we were lighting a fire and unrolling mats for a peaceful night of sleep instead of balling ourselves into the darkest shadows we could find and hoping to make it through the night.

From how often Harald glanced at the sky during evenings, I knew he followed the star. But he didn’t tell anyone else that.

Harald didn’t trust us any more than we trusted him.

It wouldn’t surprise me if one of these nights, we woke to find him and Tove had slipped away.

We walked for hours, and Clark and I received our second water and turkey leg of the season. It’d come faster than last season. Either summer wouldn’t last as long, or we would have to face the rest with no refreshments. Either way, we gobbled up our servings happily.

Once more, I shared the last of my water with Tove while Clark offered his too freely to others. Some of them had paid for food to be delivered during the seasons as well, various forms of meat, cheese, and bread. Scraps were given to others to combine with their stash of chickweed and dandelions until we all convinced ourselves we were full.

The grumble in our stomachs said otherwise.

I offered to take first watch. Harald said he’d join me, and the two of us took post near the mouth of the pavilion we’d claimed for the Seaweeds, keeping watch as the others drifted to sleep.

I placed my axe between my feet while I fiddled with my necklace. One made me think of Father, the other of Mother. The more I went through this labyrinth, the further away they both seemed, and the more impossible the future I’d dreamed of became.

You will not win the labyrinth.

I’d tried not to think of the fortune teller’s prediction, but it gnawed on me nonetheless. If I didn’t reach the center first, I had no second plan. No future to fall back on other than drinking bone soup with Mother on Haven while we waited for the Father that I’d never met.

And the more years went by, the more I’d be forced to consider the possibility that Clark had been right—my father wasn’t Gerald Montclair, and I had no great name to claim.

I stared at my axe—my father’s weapon of choice—and begged Clark to be wrong. For the doubts in my head to be silent long enough to remember the truth.

My gaze swung to Clark, already asleep. He’d chosen the spot nearest my feet, trusting me to keep watch over him.

Perhaps that was my future. Him.

“You and Clark seem close,”

Harald whispered as if he’d sat in my mind to hear everything. He twisted his sword on his lap while keeping his eyes on the various openings in the stone maze where someone could come, but they flickered to me, as if one glance could tell him everything about me and Clark.

I set my jaw.

“We only have each other.”

“I get that. Tove is all I have.”

His sister slept near him, her body so tiny I could hardly see her from where she’d wedged along the stones. She was so young. I imagined her and Harald working on a ship, waiting for the day they could make their escape. Coming into the labyrinth at their owner’s bidding. Fighting to stay alive.

“Still, it’s a lucky thing to have a man look at you the way Clark does, and I see how protective you are of him.”

I didn’t want to hear this. This had been Clark’s lie, not mine.

Harald seemed intent to make me listen.

“I’ve been to thirty islands out of the hundred, and not come across a love like that. You two are lucky to have each other.”

I snagged the first chance to divert the conversation.

“What ship did you work on?”

“The Castello, owned by Marcellus Jasper. He’s a tough man to please, but if we kept our head down and did our work, we got away mostly unscathed. But Tove was so young, she couldn’t do much, and I think he was looking for a way to sell us. Guess sending us into the labyrinth on the off-chance that we will win it for him was his next best idea.”

“That can’t be legal. If you win, you earn the Silver Wings, not him.”

He shrugged as if it didn’t bother him, but the twitch of muscles in his jaw told a different story.

“He owns us. What is ours, belongs to him. And what man wouldn’t want the rights to the Shallows? The yearly income from that trade route would pay for us ten times over.”

Still sounded unfair to me. They were children. No one ought to own them at all.

“It wasn’t all that bad. Cook had a tender spot for us so we were fed well, and I learned how to navigate from the best. Plus, Vincent often hired the Castello to make trades along the outer islands, so we are some of the few who’ve been to almost all of them.”

I schooled my voice to neutrality, but my attention greedily hung onto Vincent’s name. I’d gotten all my details from my father’s nemesis from news clippings and my mother’s outdated stories. Harald had seen him.

“Did you ever meet Vincent’s son?”

“Leif? Yeah I’ve seen him. Luke too, before he died.”

Luke. The statue I came upon earlier.

“Luke was everything you’d expect the son of Vincent to be. Tall, strong, an air about him as if he knew he would one day inherit the world. He hung close to his father while deals were made, always checking shipping logs twice and inspecting our inventory. But Leif, he was different. He was like one of us.”

The way he said it was as if they’d been part of a secret club together, one that the rich weren’t allowed to join.

“It was back before Tove was with me, when I was just a little boy on Marcellus Jasper’s ship, and Vincent would appear. Leif and I would disappear among the crates as soon as they came aboard, and hide when his father came looking. It wasn’t until Luke died that he turned cold.”

I tried to imagine Leif as a carefree child, but I couldn’t. It was easier to picture him as the man I’d met, the one who had killed twice and who made a deal with Dimitri that sounded suspiciously like he intended to do harm upon Callahan.

“I pity him”

Harald continued.

“From what I hear, he watched his brother die in this labyrinth when he was only nine. And his father still forced him to return the next time to compete for the prize of a tonic that protects two people from all danger.”

Leif didn’t win that. An older gentleman from Rowls did.

And now, for a third time, Leif had entered the labyrinth. Did his father force him this time too?

“I saw him only a few months ago, though he wouldn’t remember me. Leif stayed like a puppet at his father’s side, as stoic and boring as the rest of them. I suppose we all had to grow up sometime, but he’s been dealt a wretched hand. Still…I’m grateful we haven’t encountered him in the labyrinth.”

“You said you’d played together. Surely he wouldn’t kill you.”

“The Leif I played with is gone. The one that roams this labyrinth is the monster his father created him to be, and there’s not a scrap of mercy in him.”

There were two dead bodies in the labyrinth to attest to that. Perhaps more. The labyrinth first found Leif as a young boy, but now he was a man, and he knew what to expect from this maze. The corridors, paths, and tricks might have reset, but he’d navigated them twice before. We were running wild on his playground.

I twisted my axe. If it came to it, could I kill him?

Harald dragged a finger down the blunt edge of his blade with his gaze latched onto Tove’s tiny frame.

“What I’m about to tell you is told in confidence, okay?”

I tilted my head, considering his words. Secrets were something to be shared with friends, not those who planned to abandon you at the first sign of trouble. Did Harald trust me, or was this his way of trying to breed trust, or tricking me into thinking he trusted me so he could betray me later?

I banished the thoughts. Those were the labyrinth talking. Looking at Harald’s light brown eyes…there wasn’t a scrap of deceit in him.

I nodded.

“I made a deal with Marcellus Jasper before leaving. We win, and he gets the Silver Wings. But if I die in here, he tears up Tove’s contract. She’s too young and too small for him to care, so he agreed.”

He inhaled deeply before continuing.

“I don’t know you or Clark well, so I have no business asking this, but I’m going to ask it anyway. If I die, would you take Tove under your wing? She has no family to return to.”

His words swelled in the deep caverns of my heart. Clark and I knew something about not having family.

“She’ll be taken care of,”

I said, and I meant it. I wouldn’t let this labyrinth turn me into a monster as it had to Leif. If there was humanity within me, I intended to keep it.

Harald might have mumbled his thanks, but the sound splintered when a scuffle came from down one of the paths, like a beast dragging their claws against a rock, and my blood ran cold.