Chapter 8
Elianne stepped into the dark of the lava tube, casting a glance over her shoulder.
The others were asleep—Logi and Ember in their chamber farther removed from the others, Eldrid in the uppermost chamber he preferred, which they’d taken to calling his perch.
Dae in the smallest of the rooms attached to their main living space.
His breaths had been deep and even for over an hour. But was he really asleep? She’d never questioned it before, after her first nights of solo exploration that always led to the ice wall. He’d never called her back, never followed, never confronted her about them.
But he knew. Had he always known or discovered it lately?
It didn’t matter. He’d told her to get word to the king, hadn’t he?
It didn’t stop the guilt from gnawing at her, as it always did when she crept down one of the tunnels without a word to her friends. But the force that drew her was stronger than the one holding her back.
The sharp lines of basalt bit into her feet as she walked, no doubt leaving a trail of blood behind her.
She’d cauterize the wounds when she stopped, and they’d not so much as scar, but even so, she wished for the boots that had tumbled into the flow the other day and vanished.
Or the spare pair that had been on the shelves, now obliterated as well.
Fear held her muscles captive as she made the familiar journey, the questions so big in her mind because she didn’t know which would be worse—the wondering or the answers.
What had caused the tremors and collapse of so many tunnels in this section of the mountain? And what did it mean? The End of Eras? The Giver’s judgment upon them all Above? Would their tunnels soon be flooded with more of the condemned? The Cursed?
She lifted a hand to press against the cool wall of the lava tube, willing it to remain strong and steady. There hadn’t been any other tremors after that disastrous one, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be.
She didn’t believe the six of them, now five, were daemons, like Dae had always thought.
Daemons were not created from humans, the Words were clear on that.
But they were something, something bad, something deserving of eternal torment.
She had no doubt that when these flame-strengthened bodies failed—and Brandr’s death before Elianne’s arrival proved they could—that they’d find an even worse torment.
A place with no relief from the flames, where the heat actually burned them and there were no cool lava tubes into which they could retreat.
Her hand shook the closer she drew to the ice wall.
She could feel it long before the glow from the miniscule stream of lava she called up glinted off its flat surface.
Usually he was the one to summon her to a meeting, with a quick burst of frost through the tiny channel he’d trained her to find amidst all the hardened layers of obsidian and basalt.
When she’d sent the pulse of lava through it, knowing it would create a blast of steam somewhere in the palace above them, she’d expected the answer quickly.
She’d never abused the connection. Only one other time in all the years down here had she initiated contact, and it had been for an emergency then too, when one of their far-reaching tunnel systems kept collapsing, making it impossible to obey the commands he’d given them.
He had to know she asked for a meeting now for something equally important. But it had been days, by her best estimate, before he’d responded.
Days in which she’d had plenty of time to assume the worst. To wonder if the End really was upon the world Above. To wonder if the king, their only link to humanity, was dead. If his death meant they’d die too.
Ember had brought up the possibility also, worry in her blue eyes. She’d been fiddling with her long blond braid as she broached the subject around what usually would have been their supper fire.
There’d been no supper. Only fire.
Dae hadn’t flinched. Just said, “If he doesn’t call us before the last of what you’d been carrying is gone, then we go to the wall and melt it. Or we go to the surface and gather snow. Or we cut through the rock and access a forbidden spring. We will not die of thirst.”
Proof he’d thought it through, yes. Probably immediately. And simple enough, if the king was dead and hence not there to punish the thanes for those forbidden actions.
Food would be harder, though. They couldn’t just gather that from the end of a lava tube unless they followed one of the geodesic vents into a dome.
Longing squeezed her chest so hard she splayed a hand over it to try to lure it into relaxing.
That is no longer your home. A truth she’d been reciting for what she estimated to be decades, from the small hints the king dropped like breadcrumbs now and then.
He so rarely gave any indication of the passage of time, but there were cycles to his appearances, both official and unofficial.
She’d pieced them together as best she could.
He stood at the wall already, the glow from her creeping flow finding its way through the clear ice and casting his face into a haunting rendition of itself. All lit-up angles and shadowed planes.
As she drew near, he melted the wall in one moment, erected it again behind him in the next.
Her fingers slid off the wall. He trusted her—or himself, more likely—enough to remove the barrier between them but never enough to remove it between her and the world beyond.
“What has happened?” She stopped several feet away, though even there, the cold radiated off him, making her shiver.
She could warm the passage with lava, even will a flame into existence over her palm—but if she tried it, he’d leave.
“We experienced a quake that didn’t come from the mountain, and our supply area collapsed into a flow. We have no food or water.”
The king was so still she thought for a moment he hadn’t heard her. Then a muscle ticked in his jaw. “That’s why you signaled.”
“Yes.” Because he expected it, she lowered her head. “You know I would not disturb you if it weren’t an emergency, Your Majesty.”
Dae refused to call him that, refused to acknowledge him as king at all. But then, Dae had lived during the reign of Isidor’s father. Dae was most likely older than Isidor himself—something she still had trouble wrapping her mind around.
Only the Blessed should live so long.
A rumble came from the king’s throat, and he did something she’d never witnessed him do before—ran agitated fingers through his golden hair. “I will return with supplies as soon as I can gather them. For now…” He sent water down the cool channel opposite her magma.
So easy. So simply he saved their lives.
She could imagine the angle of Dae’s scowl, the temper burning in his eyes. “He could supply us with a never-ending stream,” he’d said more than once, “instead of diverting the springs away from us and threatening to punish the thanes in our domes if we reach for them.”
He could. But he didn’t. She understood that it was another way to control them, and she didn’t have to ask why.
They were dangerous. Cursed.
“Thank you, Your Majesty.” She could smell the water, pure and fresh, absent the minerals and sulfur that had been in all the springs in the dome she once called home. Her tongue felt dryer than the lands of the Sun People.
“Go ahead.”
She didn’t need to be told a second time. Elianne dropped to her knees beside the channel and scooped handful after handful to her lips, until mouth and throat both felt normal again.
When she looked his way again, she saw his fingers had curled into his palm—another indication of frustration he rarely indulged. “It seems the cost of betrayal keeps increasing every moment.”
Betrayal? Her throat felt dry again. “Majesty?”
He cut a gaze her way and forcibly relaxed. “Not you, my flame. A thane—a terror-maker. That was the cause of the destruction, both Below and Above. The palace was bombed.”
“Bombed?” She raised her damp hand toward her throat.
Heat rose in her veins, as it always did when she was disturbed, and made the water steam from her skin.
For once, he didn’t seem to notice. “A man with the usual complaints. The leader of the Red Hands. They were operating when you were Above, weren’t they?”
Slowly, so slowly, she lowered her hand again. “I…believe so. Majesty.” Say nothing. Say nothing. Say nothing.
The leader when she’d been young couldn’t possibly still be the same. Bjorn was over sixty back then. And thanes rarely lived past seventy. He must have passed into the Beyond long ago. Even so.
Even so.
“He was cleverer than most—clearly, to have bypassed my security to plant his explosives in the residential wing of the palace. He gloated about it in our meeting moments beforehand and then took his own life.”
She winced. No need to wonder how this Red Hand leader had accomplished it.
The servants in the palace were all thanes.
Loyal first and foremost to whatever dome their family originally hailed from.
Bjorn had mused, all those years ago, about how easy it would be, on the one hand, to sneak into the palace.
But then what? The question that had always stymied that old man with his kind heart. A question this new leader must have answered very differently. But how? How could someone go so far? Did they not realize how precious life was? “Were there casualties?”
The king gave one brisk nod. “Twenty-two dead, a hundred seventeen wounded. This is of course why I couldn’t respond to your alert more quickly.”
When he sent the message, he called it a summons. When she did, it was only an alert?
Hardly new information. “Understandable, Majesty. I am sorry to hear of the tragedy. I hope your family is unharmed.”
“My eldest two children were both killed. As well as my consort.”