Chapter 25
RYLAND
This time, the silence inside Gravespire felt almost encouraging, as if the temple was daring us to press our luck.
Varian and I moved silently as ghosts, easily retracing our earlier steps, reaching the massive door within minutes. The runes pulsed faintly, alive with ancient power, bleeding into the stones around the door.
The carved faces glared, like they wanted to scold us for trespassing.
“There’s not a single guard,” I muttered, hand resting on the hilt of my blade, as if steel would do me any good. “Which means they’re all on the island.” Fear stabbed me with a pointed blade, poking holes in my resolve. “We shouldn’t be here. We should be with Lyrae.”
“I’m telling you, she doesn’t need saving, Ryland. You start treating her like she’s made of glass, and this is over before it begins.” Mid-stride, he turned around and faced me.
“She’s not the wide-eyed girl you remember who needs you to protect her. She’s our equal. Fuck, she’s more than our equal. Don’t make the mistake of treating her like anything less.”
“I was just…” I dragged my hand through my hair. He was right. Of course he was right. “That’s a fucking hard thing to ask, Var.”
“Well, make some godsdamned effort, because she won’t go for being treated like some damsel in a tower. Give her some credit, she knows what she’s doing, Ryland.”
“And what about you?” I jerked my head to the glowing runes behind him. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Oh, I’m the best at what I do,” Varian shot back, though his voice lacked its usual smugness as he studied those markings.
I scanned the corridor for guards, any sign of movement, every muscle in my body tight with awareness.
I was used to dangerous jobs, filled with complications and setbacks, so whenever something seemed easy…
Meant it was a trap.
But Gravelock’s at the island, intent on Rooke.
He’s made a mistake, is all, thinking his treasure safely guarded by an ancient magic and miles and miles of uninhabited land. Who needs guards, when there’s no one around to steal?
Why worry, when your only real threat is under your thumb?
Varian paced the length of the corridor, head tilted, pausing to study the way the light from the runes seeped along the mortar lines, noting where the glow ended, pressing his finger to the soft, crumbling mortar.
“It would take weeks to break this spell properly, if that could even be done,” he explained.
“And the stones…trying to move just one could either set off the spell or bring this entire section of the temple down on our heads. So…” His eyes flashed.
“I’m making an educated guess, and hoping I’m right. ”
Before I could ask him what the fuck he was talking about, Varian disappeared, the air whooshing out of my lungs in the now-empty corridor, and then…
“Well, what do you know? I was right.”
His voice echoed dully behind the thick door before it opened, revealing Varian outlined by a high, domed chamber suffused with eerie, golden light, the kind that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.
Power surged out of that room, flowing around me in an awful, bone-crushing stream that made me double over, gagging.
“Like I thought, the magic only wards the room against intruders, but it doesn’t keep anyone from leaving once they’re inside,” Varian explained blithely, as if he was immune from this nauseating press of magic.
“I thought your magic didn’t work down on this level of the temple?” I hissed.
“Technically, I didn’t use my magic to travel, only to cross through the ward. Now stay there, and once I figure out how to neutralize that—” Varian pointed to a pedestal of black obsidian, surrounded with strands of golden power, spun from threads of pure fire. “We’ll be in business.”
Upon the shiny black pillar rested the Triune—the Thorn, a jagged branch of gleaming gold, the Mirror, its surface dark and rippling as though the mottled glass contained a brewing storm within its depths, and the Crown, a circlet of twisted gold and iron with gemstone shards that drank in every drop of that golden light.
“Fucking gods,” I exhaled sharply, hardly believing what I was seeing. “I can’t believe we actually found them.”
“And I cannot believe you doubted my abilities after all this time,” Varian said cheerfully, plunging his hand into his pocket as he approached the artifacts.
“Now let’s see what a hundred years of craft and cunning can do to get past this rather clever defense.
” He pulled out a small leather pouch, sorted through the contents, then produced two tiny mirrors, each the size of a gilder, shooting me a guilty grin.
“I might have made a slight detour inside Rooke’s castle,” he said, without a hint of guilt. “And perhaps I should have checked on Kaden, but it was either play nursemaid or fetch these from my backpack, and I had to make a choice. Let’s hope I made the right one.”
My own remorse was a sudden thing, thinking about Lyrae walking straight into danger like she was taking an afternoon stroll.
But Varian was right.
I had to trust she could handle herself, and we had our own problems to deal with—like how to get the relics off that platform and into our hands.
That golden light spun and twisted around the Triune, a dazzling, deadly display, because there was no doubt in my mind that any one of those hair-thin strands would slice straight through a hand, or an arm, or a neck.
As fast as they moved, there was no outsmarting them, no beating them with intuition or a pickpocket’s deftness. I had to admit, this particular prize was as well-guarded a treasure as any I’d ever hunted.
“Get over by the wall, out of the way,” Varian warned, holding the mirrors suspended in midair, his face set in concentration, hands manipulating their every movement.
“Watch and learn,” he muttered, floating the things closer and closer to those dazzling, intersecting lines of fire.
After numerous adjustments, with one final nudge, they aligned, each slipping seamlessly into that golden stream, redirecting the light back into a new, oblong loop, ceaselessly bouncing back and forth off the mirrors.
They left a hole, barely big enough for Varian to thrust his arm through.
Faster than I could see, he dragged all three pieces through the hole one at a time, while the mirrors slowly melted away, sizzling drops of molten glass dripping onto the floor, the thin rings of light stuttering, reconnecting, then re-forming the impenetrable grid around the now-empty pedestal seconds after he dragged the final relic through.
Varian took a breath, silently closed the door, and a second later reappeared in the hall, thrusting two of the artifacts into my arms, the Mirror and the Crown, keeping the Thorn for himself.
The foul things weighed more than they should, each one thrumming with ancient power, magic pounding painfully against my eardrums.
Gods. My bones felt like they were breaking, my skin might be peeling off, and I’d only been touching these damn things for about ten seconds.
If I didn’t get rid of them soon, these fucking relics would suck me dry before we ever escaped this place.
“Let’s move,” I hissed, shoving the Mirror into my inside coat pocket, balancing the Crown in the crook of my right arm. They weighed me down like a couple of lodestones, every step requiring far too much effort, my feet dragging across the floor, like I was fighting a strong headwind.
“This is…awful, but…we just have to get outside this part of the temple.” Varian groaned through gritted teeth, straining to take his next step. “I can’t ghost us away in the middle of all this corrupted magic, it works against my own power, which I don’t have an abundance of right now.”
“What the fuck is happening?” I grunted, managing a measly two paces.
“My guess is, the magic on this level has been keyed to the relics. We got through the protections, but what wards guard these walls is clinging onto the relics, trying to keep them down here. Kind of like a second line of defense.”
“And you didn’t foresee this as a problem?” Varian covered twice the amount of distance as me, and I wondered if it was because he’d bogged me down with two of the fucking things.
“Who the fuck do you think I am? The Seer of Tempeste?” He bared his teeth at me, but that could have been the strain of just trying to lift his feet.
“No, I didn’t foresee this because I barely had time to grab my toolkit and we were back here for a heist that should have taken a week to plan.”
“Just asking. No need to be so defensive.”
If we didn’t get out of here—with the relics—we were dead.
Everything—our entire future—hinged on getting these things to Rooke. If he didn’t have all three, then nothing we’d planned for these past fifty years would matter.
I managed a few more shaky steps when something warm trickled down my face.
I reached up. Blood.
Fuck. “I thought finding these things would be the hard part,” I breathed, “I didn’t expect to die before we even got back to the island.”
“We’re nearly free of it, just a few more feet.” Varian stopped in his tracks, swaying, the Thorn gripped in one white-knuckled hand, the tip resting on the stone floor. I stopped too, grateful for the reprieve, blood now dripping from my chin, every breath a miserable chore.
“Good, because I don’t think I can…”
The hallway exploded with the reek of ozone as three of Gravelock’s Fae soldiers appeared, each of them a foot taller than us, armed to their sharpened teeth, each radiating a dark, malevolent magic that made my stomach churn even more.
Red fire and blue fire and something shadowy spewed from their fingertips.
Purely out of habit, Varian and I put our backs together, swords drawn, opponents sized up.
Odds definitely not in our favor.