1(?) hour left to find Tanzi—
Paladins’ Hall.
If I had thought the lair of the shadow wyrms massive, it was nothing compared to this cavern. For as far as I could see, the ceiling crooked up and up and up.
And for as far as I could see, it plummeted down.
Captain and I stood on a crooked outcropping, the tunnel we’d just abandoned at our backs.
There was nowhere to go save for a stairwell charging up to our left. Yet the map clearly showed seven doorways at different levels and depths, as well as a path straight through the hall’s center.
“I expected a bridge,” I said, stretching the map wide and holding it before me. “See? Right here, it says a bridge will take us up to the door I need.”
As I spoke, the Rook rubbed his beak against my ear. I absently scratched at his neck. “See anything useful?” I asked him, but all he did was coo.
“Maybe the bridge fell?” Captain suggested. He strutted to the rocky edge. A tilt of his long body, a stretch of his neck, and he peered straight down.
I shuddered. “You’re making me nervous bending over the edge like that.”
“I am rather close, aren’t I?” He flipped his smudged hand in my direction, flashing his Witchmark. “I think my body knows it can fly, even if my mind says, ‘Absolutely not.’” With that, he straightened and declared, “There’s nothing to see anyway. Whatever bridge there was, it isn’t here now.”
I sent a frown up the stairs. The map showed a doorway up there, but it was not the one I needed. In fact, it distinctly said No beside it.
But there was no alternative, and every moment Captain and I stood here was one less moment I had to reach Tanzi.
Time was running out. I didn’t know precisely how long I had left, but I knew it couldn’t be much.
So up the steps we went, the Rook by wing and Captain and I by foot. Fifty-four steps in total, each one uneven and awkwardly steep.
Captain found the steps an easy height, yet even he was panting by the time we reached the top—where we faced a second uneven outcropping as well as the door marked on the map.
It was not a true door but rather an archway twice my height and four times my width. Gray rubble blocked half of it, as if a brick wall had been destroyed on the other side.
Everything within the archway glowed with the faintest blue light, and I’d have thought it from the ice or the foxfire had there actually been any nearby. But there wasn’t. Instead, the cavern wall was empty save for six fat sconces stacked on either side of the ledge. They all burst into fiery life as soon as my feet left the final stair.
I froze midstep, as did Captain. We stood there, braced for shadow wyrms or voices or Death Maidens to sing.
The Rook, however, seemed as bored as bored could be. He hopped and pecked around the fallen bricks as if hunting spiders—except I knew he would never deign to eat a spider.
I didn’t trust his complacency, though, so with measured steps, I crept toward the doorway. With each inch, sounds trickled in. Frogs, crickets, a breeze … and something else. Something that buzzed atop it all and shivered in my teeth.
“Cicadas.” The word popped from Captain’s mouth, seeming to surprise him almost as much as it surprised me.
“But we don’t have cicadas here,” I said. “And … are these tree roots?” Curiosity dashed away my caution. I strode over and touched the gnarled plant that twined around the rubble. It was tough, but more bark-like than root-like.
“It’s a grapevine,” Captain said, a puzzled lilt to his voice. “And that is my button.”
I swung around to face him, and sure enough, the Rook had a silver button clenched in his beak.
My forehead scrunched up. “You must have come this way. But how? And where does this door even go?”
Captain shrugged, but it was a distracted movement. Already, he was darting past me, aiming for the rubble and the vines.
“I don’t remember being here,” he said, “but these sounds, this breeze. I do know them. Which means …” He bent forward, hands splaying on the stones. “It means I ought to go through, don’t you think?”
He lifted one leg as if to climb—
“No.” The word slashed out, and I lurched at him. With the movement came Tanzi’s face and Hilga’s frown and the shattered hourglass. All of it roared through me in a punch of stomach-stealing fear.
I was out of time.
“You can’t go that way.” I thrust the map at him. “It very clearly says ‘No,’ and besides … I …”
“You what?” He scrutinized me, and for half a moment, as the blue off the archway pulsed over us both, I was hit with the sense of falling.
Just a whoosh of air and a sharp pop in my ears.
Then it passed, and I was left blinking as the words, “There is no bridge,” fell from my tongue.
“No bridge,” Captain repeated slowly. He too, I thought, had felt that strange punch of vertigo.
But then my words seemed to settle in his brain, and he straightened up off the stones, breaking free from my grasp.
“I see,” he murmured. A halo of snow fluttered to life around his head. “You want me to fly you somewhere, even though I don’t know how.”
“You do,” I countered. “The magic is still in you.”
“If that were true, then don’t you think I would have summoned it against the shadow wryms?”
“You’re using it right now!” I pointed, and the map—still clutched tight—crinkled in my hand. “That snow is from you!”
He glanced left, right, and his widening eyes told me that until that moment, he hadn’t even noticed the snow. All this time, he’d been changing the temperature, and he hadn’t even realized.
“I … don’t think …” He shook his head. “I don’t think I’m doing this.”
“You are.”
“Then I don’t know how!” Captain backed away, almost tripping over the Rook who hopped and squawked.
The snow chased after, and this time, the faintest wind gusted up from Captain’s toes.
What little color he possessed leached entirely from his face.
“Magic is what makes a person cleave.” He clasped his arms to his chest, as if he could keep the wind and the snow at bay. “If I try to use this power, I might cleave again. Then what?”
My lips parted. I sucked in air, ready to answer …
But then my mouth clamped shut. For there was nothing I could say. If he cleaved, then one of us would die. That was that.
“I thought so.” His arms relaxed, and the snow broke off. Not the wind, though. It funneled around him and whipped against me.
Hot, dry, powerful wind.
“I won’t let you risk it, Ryber. I won’t let you endanger your life just so you can go deeper into this nightmare place.” He drew himself up to his fullest height, a towering beast of a man, and there was a clear challenge in his jaw.
I was having none of it.
I matched his posture. I matched his expression. Then I marched right up to him and poked him in the shoulder. “Don’t,” I hissed, “say ‘just.’ I do not want your magic just so I can go deeper into the mountain. I go after my family, Captain. After my Threadsister.
“You may not remember anything, but surely you know what love and loyalty feel like. So do not tell me that if your family, that if your best friend in the entire universe needed you, you would give up on them.
“All I’m asking is that you fly me to this ledge.” I shook the map in his face. “Then you can leave. You can go right through this door and figure out who you are.”
So certain was I that he would argue more—so sure was I that he would shout or make a run for the archway—that I planted my feet and braced for impact.
Instead, his chin dropped, and he said, “Fine.” Then he spun away and marched to the outcropping’s edge.
My jaw sank low, and when I glanced at the Rook, he looked as shocked as I, his beak half open and head dipped to one side.
“Well?” Captain called. “Are you coming or not?”
“Right.” I scurried over, and before he could change his mind, I flung my arms around him.
“Uh.” He cleared his throat, and the air around us ratcheted up to boiling. “Why are you holding me?”
“For flying.”
“The thing is, you, uh … You don’t need to.”
I flung off my arms and tumbled back. Heat that was not from his magic flagged through me.
“Not that I mind, of course,” he added hastily, amusement crinkling his eyes, “but surely I can create multiple air currents. Seems logical, right? And the two separate currents will get us where we’re going—and where is that, by the way?”
Embarrassment blazed onto my neck and cheeks as I pointed vaguely up. “Somewhere that way. And stop smiling.”
His grin stretched wider. “I’m not smiling. This is simply my summoning-magic face.”
“Liar,” I muttered. Then, for good measure, I added, “Blighter.” But the word was lost in a roar of wind that tore around me. It curled beneath my feet, a physical thing that grabbed my arms, my legs, my waist.
I rocketed up, the stone fell away, and the next thing I knew, I was flying.
I might have been screaming too, but my voice was lost in the charged, spinning air that grasped me. My stomach was lost as well, left on the stone below where it could vomit up bile without me.
And my heart—blessed Sirmaya, it was going to explode in my eardrums if we didn’t slow or return to the ground or … something.
At least the wind was too strong for me to look down, though, and see how far we had to fall.
As I tried to swivel my head to see Captain, something fizzy surged up from my belly and curled into my skull. It sang along the back of my neck and behind my ribs.
I was flying. I was flying.
Captain had done it, and any moment now, we would land and I could finally, finally reach my Sisters.