Chapter 31
Thirty-One
The castle halls are thick with quiet, and darkness still blankets the sky when Alaric collects me the following morning.
I have to force myself to count to five before reaching for the doorknob—so he doesn’t know I spent most of the night waiting for him, obsessively nervously pacing and obsessively dissecting every moment of our interaction.
I pull up my hood and pretend to yawn as I open the door, but the charade falls away the moment I lay eyes on him.
He looks like a Tashiri planter: shirtless, with low-slung trousers, working gloves, and hair in a wild tangle. It’s startling and wrong and appealing. So very, very appealing. Especially when the ghost of a smile touches his sleepy eyes and he murmurs a gravelly greeting.
“Ready to go?”
“I think the better question is if you’re ready,”I blurt awkwardly. “You’re not even wearing a jacket today.”
Alaric chuckles. “Always so concerned with my wardrobe.”
“Because you’re always missing half of it.”
“The mines are dirty,” he says with a shrug that draws my gaze to his sculpted shoulders. “And my work is strenuous,” he adds. And now I’m thinking of sweat sliding through the grooves of those muscles.
I shake my head and pin my eyes to the ground. Stress and lack of sleep are clearly addling my senses. Just because he saved me from Von Nevus and we share similar trauma doesn’t mean we share anything else. Anything deeper.
I’m using him to find the gemstone triad.
Nothing more.
I repeat this like a mantra as Alaric leads me through the deserted halls and down a twisting staircase, to the base of a circular turret.
He runs his fingers across the stones until there’s a distinct click.
Then the wall rotates, and the next thing I know, we’re expelled from the castle and skirting around a watchtower, into the twists and turns of the walled city.
Alaric moves at a breakneck pace, leading me in the opposite direction of the trail that took us to the highest reaches of the mountain.
Instead, we wind down streets full of sleeping stone houses until we reach another Fortress wall—this one built into a cliff’s edge.
A wooden sign indicates the Kirana mineshaft lies below, down a steep flight of stairs carved into the mountainside.
“Watch your step,” Alaric whispers over his shoulder. “The stairs can be slick. And keep close. We won’t be able to see more than a few paces ahead.”
He doesn’t have to tell me twice. I am more than willing to huddle close to the tantalizing warmth of his body.
At the bottom of the stairs, he takes a lantern from a peg and ducks beneath a wooden archway set into the rock face. It’s hardly large enough for a person to pass through, and I take a breath for courage before fisting my skirt and following Alaric into the dark.
I shouldn’t be nervous. I’m accustomed to living belowground.
This mine shaft should feel familiar and comforting compared to Soren’s austere palace.
But the deeper we shuffle into the oppressive blackness, the more the air dampens and sours—so opposite the dry clay hallways of the hillock palace, which are always spread with spicy cedar rushes and lit with glowing sconces.
“How do the miners see what they’re doing?” I ask, tripping over my own feet for the third time in as many minutes.
How am I supposed to hunt for Callahan’s gemstones in pitch-blackness? is what I really want to ask.
“The drilling site is brighter, you’ll see,” Alaric assures me.
We round another tight corner and emerge into a high-ceilinged cavern that’s only marginally brighter, even after Alaric hangs his lantern in an iron fixture. It would take dozens of lanterns to counteract the sheer size and oppressive gloom of the cavern.
“Wait for it,” Alaric says, sensing my skepticism
A moment later, the lantern light catches on a thick vein of silver ore striating the cavern ceiling, which reflects back onto another deposit near my feet and jumps to a glittering streak just above Alaric’s shoulder.
On and on, the silvery glow bounces from one vein of silver to the next until the cavern glows almost as bright as midday.
“It’s stunning,” I murmur as I trace a vein of silver along the outer wall to where picks and shovels and helmets are arranged in neat rows.
In the center of the space, wooden handcarts wait to be filled with excavated silver ore, all of it well-lit.
“It’s ingenious,” I continue, “but also completely inefficient.”
Alaric, who’s been gazing up into the cathedral-heights of the ceiling with a proud smile, turns to glare at me. “Excuse me?”
“You’re unable to excavate all this silver ore because you need it for light.” I gesture overhead.
Alaric shrugs stiffly. “It’s too dangerous to have more than one open flame down here—too many volatile gases are released during excavation—but it doesn’t matter. There’s plenty of silver ore in the mountain. We don’t need it all.”
“You might not need it all, but what about the rest of us?” I ask as I inspect the walls, which are literally bursting with riches, a fraction of which could change the circumstances in Tashir beyond recognition.
Their silver doesn’t matter, Ro reminds me. Focus on finding the gemstones.
But it could matter. I feel it in the deepest parts of me—the same places Earth Mother’s power takes root when I’m gardening.
“What’s your part in all of this?” I ask Alaric. “The operation seems pretty straightforward.” I mime swinging a pickax at the wall. “I see no need for power.”
Alaric scoffs and places a possessive hand against the cavern wall.
“I can feel which portions of the mine are stable enough to excavate—and how deeply to follow a vein. I open and reinforce new shafts before sending miners down, and stop cave-ins before they cause too many injuries. We’ve only lost three miners in the five years I’ve overseen the work down here. ”
I give an appreciative nod. “That all sounds quite impressive, but I’m afraid I’m having a hard time picturing it. Will you show me your power in action?”
“You asked me to bring you to the mines, not put on a show.”
I smile and bat my eyelashes. “Please? I showed you far more than simple gardening. We’re hardly even.”
“You are the most galling and demanding person I’ve ever met,” Alaric says, but there’s a smile in his voice”And you’re in luck because I’ve been meaning to create a new access tunnel to an older shaft on the other side of this wall anyway.”
He closes his eyes and digs his fingertips into the wall
Within seconds, a palpable surge of energy crackles through the stone—like a hive of bees buzzing back to life after a long winter.
I instinctively widen my stance, half expecting a sinkhole to swallow me.
Or for the ground to crest into a wave and toss me across the cavern, the way King Soren flung Haddesh across the courtyard of the hillock palace.
But the trembling remains steady, and a sound like a deep-bellied sigh fills the cavern.
A moment later, a divot appears in the wall just above my shoulder.
I watch in horrified wonder as the hole slowly widens and deepens, as if a large invisible worm is tunneling through the solid rock.
It reminds me a bit of the stakes we twist into the soil of certain planting beds to support vining vegetables.
Except those stakes churn out messy clumps of dirt as they spiral into the earth.
Alaric’s power slices through the rock like butter.
Not a speck of mud or shard of stone breaks loose.
It’s as if the earth is happy to bend to Alaric’s will—just like he claimed.
Like his changes are as natural as if they’d been formed by battering wind and rain over thousands of years.
I tear my gaze away from the growing tunnel and squint suspiciously at Alaric, who looks more relaxed than he has since I arrived at the Fortress.
The tense set of his jaw and rigid line of his shoulders has finally gone slack.
Which makes no sense. Changing something as solid as rock should be difficult.
Sweat should be dripping down his face. His forearms should be quivering with effort.
But Alaric and the earth appear to be sharing the load.
Blending in perfect harmony, like the notes of a familiar song.
Like the incantations I sing to the bagrava.
Nausea grips my throat, and even though I can see Alaric’s tunnel widening before my eyes, it feels like the cavern walls are pressing in, threatening to crush me and everything I thought I knew about the Vanzadorian’s power.
I need it to stop. Need him to stop.
“That’s enough!” I shriek, startling Alaric from his trance.
He blinks and leans over his knees, finally looking as dizzy and drained as I feel. “Are you duly impressed?” he asks through panting breaths.
I don’t answer because I don’t have a clue what I’m feeling. Watching him move the earth was supposed to confirm the wrongness of his power and reveal Earth Mother’s resistance. But instead of certainty, a cold lump of dread is settling in my stomach.
Don’t let him distract you! Keep your focus on blood, flesh, and bone, Rowenna reminds me. But her voice sounds weak and far away again. Perhaps because we’re so far underground?
“Well?” Alaric asks, “What do you think?” He holds out his hands and flashes a confident grin, but it doesn’t conceal the yearning in his voice, the desperation in his eyes for a scrap of approval.
“It’s incredible,” I whisper with unabashed awe. “Is it safe to enter?”
Alaric huffs out a breath. “Of course it’s safe. Did you forget this is my job?”
I roll my eyes and slip inside.