Wayfarer

“His death was the disappointment,” she said. “You letting him fall off the side of a mountain was a disappointment.”

“So now you believe it was an accident after all?” Nicholas challenged. “I didn’t push him?”

She cast him a pitying look that made his soul heat and itch. “I can see now that you don’t have what it takes to pull off a murder. There’s no iron in you. If you had done it, you’d still be on that mountain, weeping about it.”

Nicholas opened his mouth and barely caught the words. I’m more Ironwood than you are.

An icy current swept through his blood, and he let out a low, bitter laugh at himself. Did he really have so much pride that he’d use his hated heritage to argue that he wasn’t as soft as she believed?

“He was my best friend,” she said. “My only friend. I’m not going to apologize for being furious with you for what happened, because his life mattered to me. But…it wasn’t what you had with Linden. If I’d had a choice, if there’d been any other way to get a modicum of respect in that family, I wouldn’t have…”

“Become betrothed to Julian?” he finished.

“Nor any man.” Her eye bored into him in the beat of silence that followed, daring him to say something about it. “I have always preferred the company of women, regardless of history’s views of it. The rare exception being your idiot beloved, who can eat rocks and choke for all I care.”

Nicholas, as it stood, did not have an opinion or prejudice about any of this, other than to think the feeling she’d described was likely mutual on Etta’s part.

“Have a care,” he said, with a light warning in his voice. “My beloved is not by any means an idiot, but she has been known to have a rather vicious backhand.”

“I’m not…I’m not without a heart,” he heard Sophia say, her chin raised, eyes straight ahead. “I’m not. I just don’t have the luxury of being soft. I am trying to survive.”

The same as you, his mind finished for her. Life had offered them both poison—different, bitter variations of it, but poison all the same. He reached up, rubbing a hand over the curve of his scalp.

“You don’t have to trust me,” she told him, eyes shifting away. “Just trust my anger. I would rather die than let that old man have everything he wants. He needs to know what it feels like to want something forever out of his reach.”

Nicholas nodded. He could manage that much. She’d made excuses about needing his help to disappear once the astrolabe was found in their initial bargain, but he had a far easier time trusting revenge as her motivation. But there was something about the way she held herself, tugging at her ear, that made him wonder what was being left unsaid.

Sophia walked faster, moving ahead of him on the path, dodging his questioning look entirely.

Their destination rose into view on the cliffside. The crumbling remains of the Roman amphitheater, stacks of stone slabs left to manage the weather and world the best they could, looked ghostly under the bone-white touch of the moon. Beyond them was the sea, its endless glistening, thrashing darkness. He wondered, given the strategic position, if the Romans had held this land to watch for, and ward off, the Carthaginians in ancient times.

“I think it’s just this way,” Sophia said. “Remind me to nick a harmonica if we ever find ourselves past the eighteenth century again. Finding the passage by resonance would make this bloody mess a great deal easier.”

They ventured down the steps, the seats, toward the main stage at the center of it all. Dust flew up around Nicholas’s feet, staining his damp shoes, filling his lungs. He squinted into the dark, but the only indication the passage was nearby was a faint tremor that crawled along his skin.

“I’ll check this way,” he called to Sophia, who was walking the perimeter of the amphitheater above him.

Nicholas turned to make his way down the next set of steps, which seemed to lead into some sort of partly collapsed pathway or room beneath the section of seats.

“I’ll take the lower level, if you search—”

He walked into a shivering patch of air—and walked face-first into a cold, crushing pressure that stole the breath from his lungs and seemed to wrench his heart clear out of his chest.

BEFORE HIS MIND MADE SENSE OF WHAT HAD HAPPENED, before his body seemed to wake to the fact that he’d stumbled onto the passage, he was drowning—salt water rushed into his lungs as he gasped in alarm, choking him. Water—water—he was caught in a rolling current, feet over head, feet over head, tumbling—

Nicholas kicked his legs to break out of the riptide, his mind so disordered his vision blackened like tar. He couldn’t find the surface of the water—it was all darkness, darkness and the moaning drum of the passage, which made the water around him beat with a frantic rhythm.

Do not panic, get ahold of yourself—bloody hell—bloody passage—

And bloody Sophia, as well, for not so much as alerting him to the fact that some madman had hidden the passage underwater.

Salt water turned his eyes raw, but he kept them open against the burn. His entire chest ached with the need for air. He wasn’t going to drown, damn it all. But it was night, and without a good glow from the moon or fire, it was nearly impossible to tell up from down. He forced himself to stay still, feeling for the current. Just as he was about to start swimming in the natural direction his body wanted to float, there was a burst of movement beneath him, almost like an undertow, as the passage exploded back to life and Sophia shot out of it. He reached down, gripped whatever part of her he could, and began to kick wildly in a direction he hoped was up.