Chapter 18
I WOKE UP TO THE SOUND of rocks shifting.
Somehow I was sprawled on the carpet with Aven’s cloak and the sail covering me from chin to toes. I blinked sleepily, and the blurry room came into focus. Aven sat next to the hearth, a small, cheery fire burning beside them.
“What time is it?” I asked, my voice a morning croak.
Aven shrugged. “I don’t know. But Rylan has been working on moving the stones for a few hours now.”
Yawning, I stretched while still on the floor, pushing my hands above my head and pointing my toes.
Aven looked away, the fire heating their cheeks to a rosy red.
“Have you talked to the kids?”
Aven huffed a laugh. “They are literally our age. Zig is your twin.”
“Yeah, but they act like children.”
“And we don’t?” Aven asked, raising their eyebrow.
“Point taken.” I pushed myself from the comfort of the makeshift bed and shivered when I stepped into the cool air. Leaning against the cave-in, I yelled to the other side, “You okay over there?”
“We’re great!” Zig answered, and my anxiety eased at the sound of his clear, strong voice. It came from far closer than the night before. “How about you two?”
I checked with Aven, who gave me a lazy thumbs-up. “We’re fine!” My stomach growled as soon as I said it. Okay. That was a problem. “Is there anything edible in here?” I called to Rylan. I received a laugh in return. Great.
I wandered away and plopped down on the carpet.
Maybe I could mend the strap on my pauldron while we waited.
I hated not being able to do anything to fix the situation.
I held on to the fact that at least we had a map.
A real map to the invisible realm. And sitting idle was a small price to pay for that.
Time passed slowly, punctuated only by the occasional rumble of rocks knocking about and the grumble in my stomach.
“Um… Ellinore? Aven?” Farrah called some interminable time later.
“Yes?” I answered from my bored sprawl on the makeshift bed.
“Hypothetical question. What should we do if someone approaches us?”
Alarm bells rang in my head. I jumped to my feet. Aven joined me by the wall, their shoulder brushing mine. “What do you mean?” they asked.
“Like if a group of people are riding in our general vicinity? And they’re, like, pointed toward our camp?”
That didn’t sound hypothetical. “Um… are you sure this situation is hypothetical?” I asked, digging my fingers into the dirt and gravel of the rockslide.
“I didn’t want to worry you, but no.”
Aven and I exchanged a nervous glance. “How many?” Aven called. “And what do they look like?”
“Six or so on horses. And they have swords and bows. Their faces are covered.”
The faery’s words rang in my head.
“Run!” I yelled. I clawed at the rocks, hoping to magically bring them all tumbling down. “Run! Do you hear me, Farrah?”
“But what if I try my new disarming move? I’ve been practicing with Zig.”
“No! Are you kidding me? Run!”
I pressed as close as I could, straining to hear. Farrah barked orders to Zig and Rylan. The scuffling noises of breaking down camp followed.
“Don’t worry about the camp!” I yelled. “Get on horses! Take the map!”
But it was too late. The thunder of hooves echoed on the rocks, too many to be just our mounts. A gruff voice that I couldn’t make out. A scream that was maybe Farrah. More voices, more shouts, more chaos.
“Catch him! Disarm her!” There was the unmistakable metal scrape of a sword being drawn from a scabbard. The commotion of horses whinnying in agitation, and people shouting, and voices overlapping one another.
And then a loud shout breaking through it all, followed by an ominous silence.
“Zig!” I yelled. “Farrah! Rylan!”
A throaty laugh was my only response. The horses departed, the sound of their hooves decreasing as they rode away.
“Zig?” I called, closing my eyes. “Zig?”
Aven hadn’t said a word. They rested their hand on my back, their gentle touch a sharp contrast to the jagged fear coursing through me.
I wrenched away from them and paced the length of the room.
“You said to trust them!” I pointed my finger in the general direction of Aven, not wanting to meet their eyes, the anger within me welling quick and hot and ready to burst at the nearest target. “And now! Now they’re gone! And the map is gone!”
“We don’t know that.”
I whirled on them. My hair fell into my face in wild tangles.
My tunic was bunched oddly from how I’d fallen asleep, and my breath was horrible.
I had broken armor and was trapped in a paranoid man’s absurd hidey-hole full of magical snares.
My brother was gone. Our means of escape was gone.
The one clue we had to the invisible realm of the Elder Beast was gone.
How could they be so calm?
“We do know that! Did you not hear? Those weren’t helpful people. They were thieves or bandits or someone with ill intent who has been tracking us since day one! They knew we were here!”
Aven sat down at the hearth, expression placid.
Like it didn’t affect them at all. In fact, it was almost like we were in court and that flat, royal personality they used around everyone else had taken hold.
“If they’ve been trailing us that long, then they have to be other questers who heard your outburst at the inn with the mages. ”
I crossed my arms. My hands were freezing. “What?”
“Think about it. I heard the rumor within hours all the way at the castle. They could’ve heard it too and are also looking to cash in on the Elder Beast’s whereabouts.”
I didn’t like how they’d worded that, but it was no secret that all my quests before this one, barring the very first, had been about winning gold. I breathed out and started pacing in a circle. “That’s a large jump in logic. If it’s other questers, why wait until now?”
“Remember when someone rifled through our bags? They didn’t take the gold because they didn’t need it. They were looking for a clue and didn’t find one, which means they knew we didn’t have one either. Until today.”
That was sound logic. “Okay. So they’ve been following us for a while.”
“They scouted us yesterday,” Aven said. “I heard them but didn’t see them. And they obviously knew we were here to retrieve something for the quest. Something that would help us. And when you and I weren’t present, they took their chance.”
“I never should have trusted Rylan to get us out. I shouldn’t have waited on a rescue. I never should’ve listened…” But the damage was done.
Aven’s face flushed. “You mean you shouldn’t have listened to me.”
The statement had bite to it, more animosity than I’d ever heard from Aven, even when we were playing at rivals. And that blank mask slipped into anger.
“I didn’t say that!” I shot back, shame curling in my gut.
“But you meant it! You didn’t trust me to stand watch.
You didn’t trust me enough to tell me you’d been poisoned by the fire salamander.
You didn’t even trust my advice about having your pauldron fixed.
” They threw up their hands in a gesture of complete frustration.
“When are you going to realize that I’m only trying to help you? ”
“Trying to help me by reporting back to the king?”
They flinched hard, face paling. “That doesn’t negate the fact that I’m on your side and want to see you succeed! If only you’d listen sometimes!”
“Hey, this is not my fault. I didn’t want you or the others tagging along while I figured this all out to save my brother. I have historically worked alone, you know.” Not completely alone. But not with humans. Not with anyone who would judge me.
“It’s not weakness to rely on others, to take advice, to trust people.” Aven sighed wearily. Their shoulders slumped. “You’re not alone now, Ellinore.”
“I know! And look where it has led me! Led us!” I rubbed my brow, a headache brewing in my temples.
“Whoever was out there now has a map to not only the Elder Beast but all the primordials.” And if Dave had lectured me merely about the horn of the Elder Beast, imagine what he would think about pieces of all the other creators of our world.
I would have to call him, and face the consequences with Aven and the monarchs and whatever dungeon I ended up in later.
My hand drifted down to my wrist, fingertips brushing the bracelet.
“If only the fail-safe spell had actually worked,” Aven said wryly. “The map would be trapped in here with us.”
I stopped my pacing on a coin, pulling my fingers away from the bracelet. “Say that again.”
“The fail-safe spell—”
I snapped my fingers. “That’s it! The spell Rylan triggered was a fail-safe to keep the map hidden, presumably. He said his great-grandfather always had a fail-safe.”
“And?”
“There is no way there is only one exit out of this place.” I peered around the room with new eyes. “If I were an old adventurer with prized possessions hidden in a cave, where would I conceal my other means of escape?”
The shelves had miraculously stayed upright, bolted to the stones.
Several of the objects had fallen, but not the ones that possessed real value—like the griffin feather and the faery wing.
But other than the shelves, the rolls of maps, and the table and rug, there was nothing that pointed to a way of escape.
Maybe there was another optical illusion like outside.
I walked along the walls, running my hands over every inch, looking for a stone to press or a trick of the light that would lead to a hidden door.
But every rock I touched only left scratches and grit on my fingers.
Every corner I investigated turned up nothing.
Minutes turned into an hour, the thieves fleeing farther and farther away, but I could not find another exit.
I slumped to the carpet, tugging the ends of my hair in frustration. Goose bumps bloomed on my skin, the sweat I’d built up cooling rapidly, and I shivered.
“Are you cold?” Aven asked once I’d stopped. “I can throw another log on the fire.”
I paused. The fire had been burning on and off since we arrived in the cave the day before. But the air was clear; smoke hadn’t built up in the room.
The flue.
“Put it out,” I said, running over. Hope bubbled under my skin as we snuffed the fire with the sail we’d used in our bed last night.
Even with the logs smoldering beneath it, I dropped to my knees and wiggled into the fireplace.
The hood was plenty wide for two people to fit if they wanted, and it arched in such a way that I didn’t even need to bend down far to squeeze in. I peered upward.
“Aha!” My voice echoed, bouncing off the stone.
A thick rope dangled from above, high enough to avoid the flames, but low enough for someone standing to reach it and climb out. The corridor was small, but we could both make it through. I could even see a flicker of daylight above.
“Can we get out?” Aven asked.
I ducked out of the chimney, soot-smeared and grinning. “I hope you can climb a rope.”
Climbing out of a caved-in gallery of oddities through a chimney, carrying a sword and wearing armor (minus the broken pauldron, which I sadly left behind), while my crush was hanging on to the same rope inches below me, was not on my top-ten list of things to do on any given afternoon, but I did it.
Aven and I emerged from the chimney onto the top of the pile of rocks that Rylan had led us to in the first place. I basked in the warmth of the sun and breathed in the clean, salty breeze from the ocean. And then the anxiety of the situation crashed into me.
Farrah, Rylan, and Zig had been taken. Our mounts had been stolen.
But from this vantage point, I could make out the tracks the others had left behind, leading south, running parallel to the beach.
By Aven’s logic, they were presumably other questers looking for the Elder Beast, but we didn’t know for certain. All we did know was that they had our friends, they had the map, and we had no way to follow them except on foot.
Aven breathed heavily next to me, shoulders rising and falling. They sat on the rock peak, elbows on their bent knees, hands dangling. They winced as they rolled their shoulders.
“Never climbed a rope before?” I asked, stretching out my own arms to relieve the soreness and tension. Ugh. I smelled horrible, like sweat and charred wood.
“No,” they said. “And it’s not something I wish to repeat.”
“Well, let’s try not to get trapped in a cave again.”
“Good plan.” They heaved themself to their feet, dusting off their hands on their trousers. “So what do we do now?”
“We track them. They have more than an hour’s head start and we’re on foot, so that’s not great, and—”
Aven grabbed my arm. “Look!” they said, pointing into the distance. “Is that your horse?”
I squinted in the direction they pointed, then gasped. I recognized that brown blob walking at a tree line. That was my horse! “I didn’t tether Bluebell,” I said, dizzy with relief. “She must have roamed far enough away that the thieves didn’t see her.”
“Well then, what are we waiting for?”