Page 46 of Quarter 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?”

“TheCastello, owned by Marcellus Jasper. He’s a tough man to please, but if we kept our head down and did our work, we gotaway 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 hadseenhim. “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 weremade, 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.”

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