Chapter Fourteen
They woke before full light, in that gray hour when the world outside still seemed undecided.
No one said much.
The little safe house was colder in the morning.
Breath showed faintly in the air. Karai lit the lantern only long enough for them to don their armor and gather their things, then put it out again before they left.
They ate what remained of the bread and fruit standing up, too aware of what waited ahead to pretend they could sit at ease.
Ina came out of the small bedroom with her hair bound back and her velvet bag at her side. Derran had already checked the straps attaching his own to his belt twice over. Karai stood at the door, unmoving as the post beside it, listening to something none of them could hear.
Then he opened the door, and the morning air came in thin and cold.
They climbed back through the tunnel under the rock and emerged into the mountain dawn.
The sun had not yet cleared the peaks to the east, but the upper ridges were already edged in pale gold.
Beneath them, the lands they had crossed the day before lay so far off they seemed less like country and more like memory.
Karai led them higher. The climb was no simple ascent.
They flew from ledge to ledge, then along knife-thin outcroppings where mountain moss clung in dark patches and the wind came hard around the stone.
Twice Ina had to stop and catch a fuller breath.
The air grew meaner with height, thin enough that each pull at it felt somehow insufficient.
Derran kept near her without comment. Karai, a little ahead, looked back often enough to show he had noticed.
By the time they neared the peak, Ina’s wings ached and the cold had found its way through her metal sleeves.
At last Karai settled on a ledge no wider than a shelf.
Ina landed after him and had to steady herself with a hand against the stone. The rock dropped away sheer below them into cloud-shadow and the long fall of the mountain face. Above, the peak rose only a little farther before breaking against the sky.
In the stone wall before them, cut so neatly at first she thought it a natural pattern, was a ring of symbols.
They formed a circle wider than any fairy’s height, each mark carved deep into the mountainside. The shape of them together suggested a doorway without actually being one. Not an arch. Not a frame. Something older in its logic and less interested in appearances.
Karai stepped toward it.
“Ready?” he asked.
Derran nodded.
Ina did too, though she wasn’t at all.
Karai laid his palm against one of the symbols.
Light spilled from his hand. It ran into the carving and woke it. One sign flared, then the next, then another, until the whole circle began to burn with pale gold fire against the rock. The air changed around them, growing taut and strange, as though the mountain had drawn in a breath and held it.
Ina, very quietly, reached for Derran’s hand. He gave it to her without looking away from the circle and squeezed once. The pressure was slight, but it steadied something in her.
The last symbol lit.
For a heartbeat, the entire circle shone so brightly she could not see the stone beneath it.
Then the light dropped inward, the glowing doorway vanished, and in its place was only darkness. An opening cut into the mountain. Narrow at first sight, but deep. Very deep.
Karai took his hand away.
The three of them looked into it.
Then, because none of them had come all this way to turn back at the threshold, they went in.
The cavern began badly.
There was no gentle slope downward, no broad first chamber to gather one’s courage in.
The tunnel opened almost at once onto a narrow stone bridge, old and without railings, thrown across a vast dark expanse.
It looked as though someone had carved a path through the mountain and then forgotten that living things had to cross it.
The stone itself had the pale crumbling look of something that had endured too long and wanted the dignity of being left alone.
Far across the bridge, barely visible in the low light, lay another ledge and beyond it, the mouth of a deeper tunnel.
Ina stared down into the blackness below and saw nothing.
“That bridge does not look comforting,” Derran pointed out.
“Definitely perilous,” agreed Ina.
Karai looked once at the bridge, then across the open span. “Flying is wiser.”
No one argued.
They lifted from the ledge together and angled out over the cavern rather than trust the crumbling path. For the first short stretch, nothing happened. The air was cold and still. The only sound was the beat of wings and the faint scrape of loose grit dropping from the bridge somewhere below.
Then Ina heard it.
A hiss.
Low at first. Then louder. Then multiplied.
She turned her head sharply toward the sound, but before any of them could react, a giant snake’s head lunged up out of the dark with such speed that it seemed to arrive from nowhere.
Its jaws snapped shut inches from her, having gone just a little too far to snag her.
Yet the force of its passing struck her shoulder and knocked her spinning backward through the air.
She yelled out, caught herself wild and hard, and in the same instant saw the thing circling back from beneath the bridge.
“Watch out!” she shouted at the two princes.
Derran and Karai dropped away just as a second strike tore through the space where they had been.
Ina thrust light into both hands on instinct.
The cavern bloomed.
What she saw below nearly stole the light from her all over again.
The darkness under the bridge was not empty.
It was moving. A pit of enormous snakes, thick as tree trunks and coiling over one another in a mass so dense the eye could barely separate one body from the next.
Their scales flashed wetly in the sudden light.
Dozens of heads reared upward, mouths open, tongues lashing, eyes fixed on the three fairies above them.
One struck. Then another. Then three together.
The air became chaos.
The fairies darted and swerved, driven back every time they tried to gain ground toward the far ledge.
Snake heads shot at them from below, from the sides, from gaps between the stone supports of the bridge.
One slammed into the underside of the bridge hard enough to crack part of it away.
Chunks of stone dropped into the writhing mass beneath and disappeared.
Derran transformed. One moment he was beside her, swearing under his breath as a fanged jaw swept by his leg, cracking against the armor hard enough to draw sparks and send him tumbling. The next he was a swallow, sapphire dark in the cavern light, all speed and impossible precision.
He dove.
Ina saw him flash between two striking heads, disappear below one coil, then drive his beak straight into an enormous yellow eye. The snake shrieked. Another head rose, and he cut across it too, gouging a second eye before climbing hard.
The shriek became many shrieks together. The sound told its own truth. These heads were not separate beasts. They belonged, or were bound, to one vast thing below.
Karai, meanwhile, had fire in both hands and metal singing with it.
Ina understood then, with dim clarity, the lack of blades in the armory.
He did not need them, nor the coin discs.
He used his own magic with the same principle, sending thin bolts of heated metal, lined with light that glowed white in the center and violet on the edges, into scale and flesh where the heads were softest.
One snake reeled back with a strip of its face split open.
Another caught the edge of the blast along the jaw and twisted away.
And Ina understood too, seeing him in battle, how the burrow court prince had such a fearsome reputation.
Why she had been told many times over that he was dangerous.
In his armor, with magical blades flashing in his hands and around him in motions she could not process quickly enough, cutting ruthlessly through monster scales, he looked vastly different from the calm prince in the library.
He looked like an angel of death, as extreme in his violence as he was in his beauty.
Beyond that, Ina could not think properly.
The light in her hands stayed because panic had left it there. Her mind kept leaping uselessly from one terror to another. Teeth. Eyes. The drop below. Derran too low. Karai too close. Another head. Another.
Then she remembered the velvet bag.
With clumsy fingers she yanked one of the small metal balls free.
It looked too small to matter.
She threw it anyway and called fire to it at the same instant.
Derran saw what she was doing and turned back into a fairy in midair, wings beating hard as he shot upward and away. Karai swore once and flung himself sideways.
The explosion tore through the cavern.
It was not large measured against the mass of giant snakes, but it was powerful. Fire cracked open in a hard, bright sphere and the force of it slammed outward. Several snake heads took the blast full on. Scales split. Flesh burst. The shrieking below turned ragged and furious.
The shockwave caught all three fairies too.
Ina hit the bridge.
The stone knocked the breath out of her, and before she could find it again, something harder struck the side of her head. Light vanished. Sound went thin. The bridge beneath her gave a long, splitting groan.
Then it collapsed.
Derran saw her go, falling into the venomous abyss below.
He changed again in one clean motion and dropped after her as a swallow, diving so steep and fast that the cavern air whistled around him. Below, one of the giant snake heads had already risen through the clearing smoke, jaws spread wide to catch what fell.
Derran reached her first. His claws caught in the cloak at her shoulder enough to wrench her sideways out of the open mouth below. The snake’s jaws snapped shut on empty air where she had been.
Karai came after them, a long shining sword in hand this time, glowing with violet fire.
He hit the snake head as Derran climbed, cutting through the side of its neck with a burst of fire and metal together.
The head sheared through and dropped, vanishing back into the pit beneath the bridge in a heavy thrashing collapse.
Derran changed back to fairy again, Ina limp in his arms.
“Go!” Karai shouted, pointing up toward the far ledge and the deeper tunnel.
Derran did not answer. He only flew, hard and ugly, without grace, spending everything on speed. Karai came behind him, one hand already digging into his own bag. Another snake rose after them, then another. Karai threw one of the fire charges down into the nearest cluster.
The blast gave them the last space they needed.
Derran hit the tunnel mouth shoulder first and carried Ina through it. Karai came just behind. The force of the explosion shoved all three of them farther in over the stone floor, and a giant snake head slammed into the tunnel wall behind them with a sound like a battering ram against a gate.
It could not fit.
Its jaws snapped once in blind fury at the narrow entrance, then withdrew.
For a little while none of them moved.
The tunnel was small and blessedly free of snakes. Derran knelt where he had fallen, still holding Ina against him. Karai braced a hand on the floor and breathed heavily. Behind them the hiss and thrash of the pit went on, muffled now by the stone.
At last, Ina stirred.
She blinked once, then twice, and sat up too quickly. “What happened?”
Karai, still catching his breath, said in a tone almost amused despite the blood splattered across his cheek, “We’re past the entrance.”
Ina looked from one prince to the other, then toward the tunnel mouth and whatever sounds still came from beyond it. “How many more chambers are there?”
Derran gave a short, humorless snort. “That was just the entrance, not a chamber.” He leaned his head against the tunnel wall and added, “Nine more to go, if I recall correctly.”
Ina groaned.
Karai’s expression softened a little. When he spoke next, his voice was quiet enough that she knew he was working to prevent his words from stinging.
“Ina... neither of us know what’s in here for sure. Neither of us expected the entrance to already be… that.”
He waved a hand back toward the snakes. “It’s best if you go back. Derran and I can go on from here. If the necklace means to be found, we’ll find it.”
“It’s not safe for you,” Derran said, and though he appeared reluctant to add the next words, he did it anyway. “He’s right.”
Ina pushed herself fully upright, though her head still rang dully from whatever had smacked against it. “I can’t do that.”
“You can,” insisted Derran. “And you should.”
“I made a promise to Jasenka. And anyway, I won’t leave you two here to die by yourselves.”
“You can still keep your promise, and joining us won’t help anything,” he replied, and his voice held an edge in place of its normal teasing.
She looked from one to the other and saw in both faces the same thought, differently worn. Concern, yes. Also calculation. They believed what they were saying. They meant to send her back for her own sake.
That settled her temper more quickly than comfort would have done.
“I’m your queen,” she reminded them, command in her voice. “And I’m going with you.”
Neither answered. Derran looked away first. Karai said nothing at all. But the silence that followed had argument in it, held back only because they both knew her well enough to hear the iron in her words.
So they rose and went on.
The tunnel sloped deeper into the mountain, and the three of them walked it in silence, each carrying the rest of the argument in private.
They had not gone far when the tunnel opened again.
This time it did not widen ahead. It simply stopped under their feet.
Karai caught himself first and threw out an arm to bar the others. The three of them stood at the edge of a hole cut clean through the floor of the tunnel. It was not broad enough to be called a chamber, only a round opening in the stone, dark and abrupt and deeply unwelcoming.
They peered down into it.
Ina lifted light in one palm and held it over the edge. The glow spilled downward, but it caught only empty air. No floor. No ledge. No wall close enough below to judge the depth of the drop.
Another entrance, then. Or another trap pretending to be one.
Karai bent, shaped a small stone in his hand with a brief working of magic, and dropped it into the dark.
They listened.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Then, from very far below, a distinct splash.
Ina shut her eyes briefly.
Of course it was water.
She could already feel the argument re-forming in the air beside her before either prince spoke it. You can’t swim. You can’t go down there. Now is the time to go back.
She had no wish to answer any of it.
I won’t give them one more reason to tell me to turn around, she thought.
She looked at them. They looked at her.
Well then, she thought, they can’t tell me not to go on if I go first.
Before either man could guess what she meant, she jumped.