Lightfall, p.31
Lightfall, page 31
Daria’s shoulders slumped. “It’s my home. I left it seeking a place in Yager Court.”
“What kind of place? As a hunter? Vassora?”
“Anything, to start.” Her mouth slid up in a half-smile. “However they’ll take me is how I’d like to serve.”
“Well, I’m glad you came when you did. With everything so out of balance, like with the Atrasat, Yager could use someone of your talents.”
Daria’s smile widened. “Do you really think?”
“I absolutely do.” Cistine squeezed her hand. “I have friends in Yager Court, I’d be happy to put in a word for you.”
Eyes fixed on their joined hands, Daria sighed. “Kind as that is of you to offer, you have too much to concern yourself with already. The trial, the attacks, the treaty…”
Each word slid over Cistine like another weight, one heavy shawl after another until she nearly stooped. But she forced her shoulders back, swallowed that faint trill of panic, and took Daria’s other hand. “It would be my honor to help a woman of Blaykrone find a place in the Courts. Just let me speak to Chancellor Maltadova’s personal archers. I won’t interfere any more than that.”
Regret crinkled Daria’s mouth, then resignation. “You’re a good woman. Valgard does not deserve the kindness you’ve shown us.”
Flushing, Cistine studied Daria’s withdrawn face, her gaze turned toward the heart of the courthouse. Then she gave her a tug. “I want to show you something.”
She led the heel-dragging, protesting hunter all the way to Kanslar’s wing and straight to Ariadne’s door, finding her precisely where she expected: playing cards with Saychelle, Iri, and Pippet. Cistine beckoned the girl away from the game first, whispered in her ear, and sent her running. Then she threw the women their coats. “Come with me.”
Ariadne raised a brow, her countenance far calmer than when Cistine saw her in the training hall that morning. “Where?”
“We’re meant to be under guard, you know,” Saychelle added.
“They can come, too!” Cistine flashed a grin at the bemused Vassora lining the walls. “Where’s Quill? Isn’t he on duty tonight?”
“Here.” He jutted his head into the room. “Why did my sister just go tearing past me like Nimmus itself was on her heels?”
“An assignment from me.”
“Ah.” Quill inclined his head to Daria. “We meet again.”
“Stars help us,” she deadpanned through a crooked smile. “Do you have the slightest idea what our friend here is plotting?”
“Knowing her, something intriguing. I’m game if the rest of you are.”
Around the room, nothing but nods. Cistine suspected any excuse to escape, particularly for Iri and Saychelle, was a welcomed one.
She led the odd procession of visnprestas, warriors, and guards outside to Kanslar’s garden. At this hour, most ghostlamps had dimmed; only moonlight showed the way through frost-laced hedges and snowbanks that hinted this time, the cold intended to stay. They found Pippet sitting on the rim of the fountain at the heart of the garden, lacing on her boots. Lined up beside her were five other pairs, all with blades glinting at the soles.
Saychelle slowed, face scrunching. “What is this?”
“Ice skating,” Iri laughed. “You remember this, don’t you?”
Daria balked. “I’m sorry, I—I can’t.”
“You mean you’ve never tried. All it takes is one night of learning! Surely that’s better than staying in your apartment alone?” When Daria scowled at the ice and the boots but didn’t leave, Cistine took that as grudging acceptance and hauled her to the fountain’s edge. “I’ll teach you myself!”
Ariadne was the first on the ice, turning back to offer both hands to Pippet, then Saychelle, then Iri. By the time Cistine had her boots on, they were all skating a trained series of frontward and backward loops and twists, occasionally with hands locked, often spinning on their own. Pippet’s balance and movements were masterful, a testament to long winters practicing on the pond behind the cottage in Starhollow. Ariadne was nearly her equal, as steady on the ice as in battle. Saychelle and Iri fumbled and clung to each other, laughter pluming the frigid air, and Daria watched them with equal parts longing and reservation in her eyes.
Swinging her feet onto the ice, Cistine bumped shoulders with her. “This is the future you’ll have in Yager.”
Daria nudged her right back. “And you? What future will you have, Princess Cistine Novacek of Talheim?”
She cast up a hand to catch Ariadne’s in passing, letting her friend haul her up in one lithe pull. Centering her balance, she offered an arm to Daria. “I’m still finding that out myself. Care to join me?”
With a bark of laughter, she let Cistine drag her onto the ice.
Time lost itself in the deepening night while they skated, powdering the ice and whirling around the stone monolith at the fountain’s center. Quill and the Vassora were a boisterous vigil seated on benches around the fountain’s rim, bantering about card games and comparing scars. Iri and Pippet took over tutoring Daria when it became clear Cistine was out of practice herself; she relied on Ariadne’s arms as much as her own feet to keep her from falling.
“You’ve been plotting this all day, haven’t you?” Ariadne asked, helping Cistine skim backward across the fountain.
“To distract you by watching me make a fool of myself?” she laughed, breathless from another near-fall. “You know me so well!”
“Well enough to know you remembered what I told Mira, about how I used to love skating before we left the city. Before…everything.” Ariadne’s eyes, gentle and bright, held hers. “Thank you, Logandir.”
Then they were off again, twirling across the silvery surface. With every revolution, Cistine imagined this moment complete; imagined Ashe and Maleck walking among the hedges, discussing weapons or music or whatever it was they argued about these days while pretending not to look too deeply into each other’s eyes. She imagined Tatiana on the ice, pelting Pippet with handfuls of snow, her laughter filling up every gap of silence. Aden, with Quill and the Vassora, his laughter like his father’s, rumbling through the air. And Thorne—
Thorne was here.
Cistine’s skates dug into the ice and she slid to a halt, staring at him.
He didn’t leave the shelter of trees where he watched them, shoulder propped against an evergreen, eyes heavy with exhaustion from yet another Blood Hive report or whatever sort of meeting took him away all day. Temple and fist to the tree, he watched her, knocking absently on the bark.
Tap, tap, tap.
Stillness.
Tap, tap, tap.
Tears burned Cistine’s eyes. Thorne’s smile softened. He knocked his fist gently on the tree again, slow and deliberate, unmistakable as if he called the words to her across the space between them.
I love you.
Three taps.
Three times more.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
FOR THE FIRST time since Tatiana, Aden, and Sander arrived in Nordbran, they woke to overcast skies and strong winds, the promise of a natural sandstorm brewing on the horizon. The perfect weather to escape into the catacombs.
Aden’s tension was palpable when they reached the steps leading down from the ruins into the dark maw of stone; the gate fastenings were intact but the bars themselves gone, and in the room beyond, old stone pillars crumbled in heaps. Pressure girdled the air, a faint hum of lingering power where earth augments propped up Siralek’s weakened bones. Still, it reeked of death.
“Something feels strange about this place.” Sander echoed her thoughts, lifting his ghostlamp high. “Something waits for us.”
Tatiana glanced at Aden. “Are you ready to do this?” she asked—wondering what in the stars she would do if he wasn’t. She wasn’t ready to strike off with Sander alone into this Nimmus-pit, and he was right; something was lurking down those twisted halls.
After a moment, Aden stepped forward. “I will do this.”
They passed through half-collapsed halls in a single line, Aden at the lead, Sander at the rear, which suited Tatiana fine; from between them she could watch the walls more closely, read the history out of this place.
It was a brutal one. Walls dark and fetid, sand spotted with old blood, branching corridors lined with flattened ledges as long as a man but only a few feet tall. Aden caught her gazing down that corridor, and a sigh dragged from him. “Ashe slept here with the other fighters.”
Tatiana wrinkled her nose. “I would’ve rather died.”
“Many of them did.”
They continued past broad, sandy training rooms with heaps of stone fallen across them, past a chamber with twin, gnarled gates hanging from their hinges, so warped they may well have been melted by a fire augment. Here again Aden slowed and stared. “Who lived here after the riots?”
“The new Lord of the Hive, I presume,” Sander said. “None of the other Tribunes know who it was, only that it was a woman.”
“I pity her.” Aden’s gaze traced the skull-stocked walls.
On and on they walked. Tatiana didn’t know precisely what she was waiting to see, but the hairs on the back of her neck prickled when they took the tunnels deeper. Aden and Sander bristled with tension as well, a pack of wolves all scenting the same danger without a name to put to it.
At long last—far longer than Tatiana liked—Aden slowed again. “This corridor dead-ends.”
Sander swore, tossing up his hands. “We’ve been down here for hours, and nothing! What were they burying if not evidence of their plans?”
“Maybe the prisoners were the ones who brought down the roof,” Tatiana offered. “Some last stroke of defiance against the Hive?”
Sander grunted, but said nothing.
“We should go back,” Aden sighed. “There’s nothing more to see here.”
Relieved to be out of the stale, murky air, Tatiana swung her ghostlamp wide and turned to follow them up the hall again—then froze, her heart sinking. “Aden. Yes, there is.”
Far in the distance, barely gleaming in the teal ghostlight, a swath of stone sprayed down the tunnel like someone had used an earth augment to blast it open. Aden was at her side in two steps, frowning. “That was the end of this corridor. I know it, I walked these halls a thousand times.”
“It was the end,” Sander said grimly. “But it seems someone knew of a path beyond it.”
Not a way out, but deeper into the catacombs.
They took it without another word.
In time, Tatiana began to doubt it was a catacomb they walked through at all; it was too long, too grand. The smooth black rock gave way to ancient deep-relief renderings of pillars set into the stone itself, arches and columns with men and creatures carved between them. She’d never seen anything like them before. Eventually, corridors changed to steps, leading them so far down the desert heat was a memory replaced by a deep, armor-biting chill. Their breath made soft puffs on the air.
The way leveled out again at last, opening into a vast stone atrium. Tatiana could only guess its size by the echo of their footfalls. Aden cast out an arm, and they all came to a halt. Scooping up a rock from the floor, he hurled it into the pitch-blackness with all his might; when it clattered against solid ground, Tatiana stepped forward, ghostlamp aloft, measuring the room with her eyes: a quarter-mile from wall to wall, and deeper than that, beneath a roof so high nothing touched their shadows. “What in the stars is this place?”
Sander’s voice was strangely soft. “I believe it was a temple.”
Frowning, she turned back to him. “What makes you say that?”
He gestured to the wall he faced, and she hurried to join him, ghostlight shedding across ancient Valgardan glyphs and drawings chiseled into the stone—hundreds of years old at least, detailed in sharp angles and misshapen bodies with knots and symbols woven throughout. The language of long-lost tribes and epic tales.
“Stars,” she breathed. “These are at least as old as the wells.”
Sander moved up behind her, his warmth a welcome buffer against the cavernous cold. “You can read them?”
“Not really read so much as recognize. But let me get a closer look.” She raised her ghostlamp higher, and Sander joined his light to hers. It was true she didn’t know what she was reading, but when she followed the drawings, then the carvings, her heart started to pound.
Seven craters drawn into the world, an eternal knot at the center of each. Around the hollows, men hooded and robed knelt with hands upraised in supplication. Above them, Old Valgardan runes, repeating over and over.
Stoj. Haval. Sinn. Faravost. The only four Tatiana could read. Life. Death. Time. Perception.
“What in the stars…” she hissed.
A clap of footfalls, and she cursed, whirling, her swinging ghostlight painting the ashen, sickly planes of Aden’s face. “This isn’t a temple anymore. It’s a burial ground.”
The reek of death clung to him, and Tatiana covered her nose with her sleeve, looking back where he came—deeper into the atrium, toward a heap of darkness fringed by Aden’s ghostlight.
“The missing guards,” he said, “and the elites.”
Everyone who’d fought back. The secret buried under the sand.
“We need to leave,” Sander said. “Now.”
Tatiana didn’t dare draw enough breath to agree. She let Aden and Sander brush past her, jogging toward the winding steps back up into the catacombs; but she paused, looking back to that wall.
Stoj. Haval. Sinn. Faravost. And the three symbols she didn’t know.
Those craters. The men worshipping before them.
When she blinked, a memory darted across her mind: fire and wind, snow and terror, a cliff at the edge of the mountains. A place she still had nightmares about.
“Tatiana!” Aden barked, jolting her from her reverie. She stepped back, lowering her lamp, and a dark wind licked the nape of her neck.
Wind. Here. In a place no natural breeze could reach.
Tatiana dropped her ghostlamp and fled.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
ASHE’S SECOND RIDE with Bresnyar was not as exhilarating as the first. Adrenaline pooled sweat on her palms while they ascended, using the cold morning fog as a veil. Bresnyar climbed this time, scuttling up the dark crags, and she laid low on his spine, one hand braced on his back, the other laid to her crude weapon: a stick whittled to a dagger’s point on one of Bresnyar’s fangs. It was rustic and brutal, precisely what she wanted to jam into Kashar’s gods-forsaken chest.
Up and up they climbed, Ashe trusting Bresnyar to find the right cliff; her own recollection of that night was a rain-battered, fever-stricken blur. She really did owe the dragon her life—and day by day, that was starting to mean something more than just prolonged suffering. It was beginning to be a reason for hope.
Bresnyar halted, claws gouging deep into the rock. His neck arched back, and he squinted up through the fog, haunches rocking in a silent signal.
They’d arrived.
Ashe bucked onto her feet, bending double on the dragon’s back, and raced up his opalescent scales. When she stepped onto the bone plate between his brows, he surged up, and with a heave and a flip Ashe landed on the rocky ledge that had nearly marked her doom.
“Kashar!” She hurtled toward the cave—and skidded to a halt, staring.
There was no fire, no bedding, not even the heap of dirt and leaves where they left her sweating and sick while they discussed the spy. Ashe scoured every inch of the cave, searching for something, anything—a muddy bootprint, a stray hair, a fleck of ash or kindling—but the Mahasaris had vanished like specters into the rock. There was no sign that anyone was ever here, that she nearly died in this place.
Kashar had fled. And taken her vengeance with him.
“No.” Ashe stabbed the butt of her pike into the rock. “No, gods damn him, no!”
She backed from the cave and bellowed profanity at the mist-heavy sky—not the signal she and Bresnyar agreed on, but she was too furious to do anything but seethe into the cave’s empty blackness. Rocks clattered as the dragon clawed up to join her. His heat swept her back, comforting, calming—
A war-cry echoed from their left, and Bresnyar’s pained roar in answer was like a blade cleaving straight through Ashe’s chest. She whipped around as he staggered and crashed to his shoulder, an arrow wobbling in the part of his tail where Salvotor chipped away his scales.
Someone had shot him; someone who now flipped one-handed onto the ledge, her scream of rage still echoing, and dashed down the verge of rock with sword upraised, aiming for that same spot on his tail.
Ashe was between them in a heartbeat, catching the blade on her pike, and though steel bit deep into the wood, it held. Ashe slammed her foot into their attacker’s gut, separating her hands from the sword’s hilt, and with a deft twist she freed the blade and lunged, diving in for the kill.
But her enemy didn’t fight back. She flung up her hands and cried, “Ashe, stop!”
Ashe did, the tip of the sword grazing the woman’s neck.
Hands trembling, Rozalie Dohnal ripped back her hood and tore down the cloth covering her nose and mouth. Wide eyes glistening, damp, golden hair swirling against her neck, she stared at Ashe like she was an illusion glimmering in the chilly air—and Ashe did the same. Because Rozalie was here, so far from Middleton, armed to the teeth, hand itching back toward her bow again.
“You shot my dragon?” Ashe shouted.
Rozalie blinked, a flicker of temper heating her eyes. “Your dragon? He was creeping up behind you to eat you, he had his gaping maw open—”
“To offer words of comfort, thank you!” Bresnyar twisted to rip the arrow from his tail with his teeth.
Rozalie stared at him. “It can speak?”
“He knows many tongues, and would feel justified calling you something foul in each of them.” Bresnyar lashed his tail, raining blood on the trees below. “I’d forgotten how much your piddly human projectiles sting.”
Rozalie’s mouth opened and shut in helpless gasps. Ashe cast aside her blade and gripped her by the shoulders. “Roz, what in God’s name are you doing out here?”
