Chapter Thirty-Five
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Thirty-Five
A hot gust of wind churned the dark clouds over Neil’s head as the trees that thickly crowned the ridge whispered with the promise of a coming storm.
He lay beneath them on his stomach in the long grass as he stared down into the startling beauty of the ravine, where rock-cut chambers peppered the soaring ocher walls over an uncanny sprawl of bones.
As he watched, Adam and Ellie were shoved to the ground at the edge of Borthwick’s camp. Worry for his sister and his friend twisted through him.
Constance flopped down beside him, and Neil’s worry mingled with an electric awareness of her proximity.
Cutting their way out of prison in the stepwell had been relatively uncomplicated, if nerve-wracking.
Neil had managed to carve off part of the stone slab that blocked their way without dropping any of it on his toes, which he considered rather an accomplishment.
The sheer terror of using Dyrnwyn now that he knew the sword could cleave him in two had even managed to distract him from thinking too hard about the fact that he had kissed Constance.
Thoroughly.
And she had liked it.
Neil wasn’t used to being an object of amorous interest—or at least, not that he’d ever noticed. Adam had occasionally tried to point out that a bar maid was flirting with him, but Neil had never had the courage to do anything about it.
He supposed knowing that he inspired Constance’s sensual instincts should have put him on top of the world. Instead, he felt wretched.
Before he had plunged into a mythical forest with Constance, everything had been fine.
Yes, he’d been tormented by occasional fantasies of doing utterly improper things with her, but he could manage that.
He’d known they were only that—wild, unrealistic fantasies.
He could box them away in a corner of his disobedient brain and go on acting like he and Constance were simply very good friends.
But then she had to go and look at him like the last bonbon in a chocolate box. Put her hands on him and open up her lips and melt into him like she wanted everything.
Only Constance didn’t want everything. She wanted a lark. And Neil was convenient—someone reasonably attractive that she felt comfortable with.
In another life, Neil might have been fine with that. He hardly abounded with sexual experience himself. They might have explored that together, and then cheerfully gone their separate ways when they were done.
That wasn’t an option anymore—not for Neil. He wanted Constance too much to have her and then watch her walk away.
Which meant that he needed to make certain that he never had her at all.
This had to stop. Neil shouldn’t have indulged Constance’s experiment at all, but there was nothing he could do about that now.
He would simply have to make it clear to her that there couldn’t be any again.
They had to go back to the way things had always been, where he was just Ellie’s stick-in-the-mud older brother and she was the danger gnome who enjoyed subjecting him to the odd torment.
And they would—just as soon as Neil was no longer pretending to be her fiancé.
Constance wriggled closer, her hip bumping against his side as she angled for a better view of the gorge.
Neil closed his eyes and prayed for strength.
“There are only two guards, and they aren’t really looking,” she whispered, pitching her voice just loud enough to be heard over the constant rush of the nearby waterfall. “It shouldn’t be any trouble to sneak down there, cut Ellie and Adam loose, and make a run for it.”
Neil dragged his thoughts from their fake engagement, his deeply conflicted emotions, and the brush of her sleeve against his side. He needed to fix his full attention on the task that lay before them—if he didn’t want someone to end up getting hurt.
“How would we get there without being seen?” Neil pressed.
“We’ll just sneak through the bones.”
“Sneak through the bones,” Neil muttered unhappily. “Why not?”
“The more important question is where we go once we’ve done that.” Constance punctuated the remark with a significant look.
She was uncomfortably close. Her hair was still loose, as there hadn’t been a hope of finding her pins in the stepwell, even with the light of the sword. Little bits of grass were caught in her thick black curls.
Neil wanted to pick them out. He was rather afraid that if he did, he was going to start kissing her again.
“What do you mean—where we go?” he whispered back.
“We have to find the astra, Stuffy. We can’t let Borthwick get it.” Constance waved at the dark openings that pockmarked the walls of the ravine. “And we can’t run about searching all of these caves without being seen.”
Neil’s stomach dropped. “You want me to do it again. Use my…”
He trailed off. He still didn’t know what to call the impossible, inconvenient, irrational ability that lurked inside of him.
“You are going to have to think up a name for it at some point,” Constance warned.
“I don’t think I’m quite ready for that yet,” Neil confessed.
He felt Dyrnwyn’s weight on his back as he faced the gorge again. Soldiers clad in khaki moved among the flowering vines and soaring rib bones that lined the sandy stream.
Borthwick stood in the center of it, surveying his domain.
In the Ramayana, Valmiki had described a weapon of apocalyptic power—one that could turn a nation into a desert and bring down the most powerful demon in the world.
Neil thought of an arcanum like that falling into the hands of the man that he had faced over Tulsidas’s manuscript back in Puri.
Constance was right. They couldn’t let Borthwick get the astra—no matter what that required of them.
He studied the holes in the face of the ridge. There were dozens of them, from simple ragged openings to chambers fronted by elaborate colonnades. Somehow, he had to use an ability he barely understood to figure out which of those doorways led to wildly dangerous arcanum.
Constance squeezed his hand. “You can do this. I have complete faith in you.”
Neil realized with a jolt that she really did. Constance was easily confident that he could do this, even though he’d only done it once before—on purpose, anyway.
“I haven’t the foggiest notion where to begin,” he confessed.
“What did you do last time?”
Neil tried to remember. “It was the bird.”
“The bird?”
Neil shook his head to clear it. He’d gone over a bit vague at the memory. “There was a bird in the stepwell. I heard it tapping at the stones. It felt… important.”
“What looks important down there?” Constance nodded at the valley—which held a platoon of soldiers, a sadistic secret police chief, Neil’s vulnerable sister and friend, and a forest of bones.
“Everything?” Neil offered back weakly.
“Stuffy…” Constance’s tone was dark with warning.
“I’ll try,” Neil countered. “I’m trying.”
He drew in a breath, readying himself to do the impossible.
Constance wiggled next to him as she inched closer to the edge.
Neil’s nascent attempt at concentration fractured.
He scooted away from her and forced his focus back to where the openings in the cliffs gazed at him like dark eyes.
Start with whatever feels important.
An impulse rose up in Neil—one that ran so contrary to his normal instincts, he knew with a sinking sense of unease that it had to come from somewhere else.
“I need to get closer,” Neil admitted uncomfortably.
Constance frowned. “We are safer up here on the ridge.”
“It’s… important,” he ground out.
Constance arched an eyebrow, then made a study of the landscape of the ravine.
“There.” She pointed to a place where the gorge was split by a sharp jut of stone. “If you stay close to the wall, you should be able to look out without being seen from the camp.”
The notch Constance indicated lay slightly to the left below them. She was likely right about it offering cover, but they would be exposed for a few seconds while they scrambled down.
That tugging, uncomfortable instinct told Neil that he needed to chance it.
Borthwick’s sepoys were fanning out in groups, moving to the nearby caves with organized precision. A couple of sentries remained behind by the camp, holding their rifles with the loose distraction of routine.
The soldier facing their way turned around. Heart thudding, Neil slipped from the grass, skidding down the steep, ruddy shale until he landed in the deeper shadow of the outcrop.
He froze, waiting for a cry of alarm to go up, but the rush of the nearby waterfall cloaked the sound of the shifting debris of his passage.
Constance dropped into place behind him.
“You shouldn’t be here!” Neil hissed.
Constance rolled her eyes. “Just get on with it, Stuffy.”
Neil repressed a groan. It wasn’t as though he could send her back.
Pressing himself to the wall, he peered out into the gorge.
His instinct had been right in one respect.
He could see more of the rock-cut chambers from his current angle.
His scholarly brain whirred as he studied them.
A guess put the ruins at roughly two thousand years ago, when this area would have been part of the ancient kingdom of Kalinga.
Neil’s attention danced over carved columns and narrow flights of stairs. Moss-covered bones rose from softly swaying stands of bamboo.
Something felt off.
I should close my eyes.
The impulse was a teasing whisper at the edge of his consciousness. Neil’s rational mind rebelled against it. How would seeing into the past be facilitated by closing his bloody eyes?
The instinct compelled him regardless.
Bugger it, Neil thought and obeyed.
Storm-scented air tugged at the fabric of his shirt. Birds chirped, wings beating softly through the nearby brush. The damp of the waterfall drifted to him on the breeze, a cool kiss against the exposed skin at his throat.
Worries spun through his mind—about what lay between him and Constance.
About how he could possibly help Ellie and Adam.
About Vanika, Subhas, and the rest of the Adrija.
Those newer fears mingled with older emotions—a lingering pang of guilt for how he had failed Ellie during the years when she had fought to make her own path in the world.
Gratitude for the moment Adam had chosen him as a friend.
An ache of nostalgia for hours spent crouched in tombs with Sayyid, arguing over Middle Egyptian pronouns.
Neil let the feelings wash over him. What would be the point in fighting them? They were all real.
He smelled earth and ancient stone, flowers and the heat of an imminent storm.
Now, he thought.
He opened his eyes.
The mossy bones and ocher cliffs lay before him in vivid color, the ravine painted with sunlight. Borthwick’s men were still there, but Neil was only half aware of them. It felt as though they were shadows—vague, unimportant ghosts flickering across the landscape.
All that mattered—all that was real—was Neil’s powerful sense that a woman used to stand on the far side of the gorge.
The feeling was like memory, wistful with longing… except that Neil had never been to this place before.
He still knew exactly how she would have looked framed by the carved stone pillars of the colonnade that fronted her chamber.
Bare feet were brushed by the hem of a sari dyed with saffron. A red bindi blazed from the warm skin of her forehead. Fine lines accented the corners of her eyes and the perfect curve of her lip.
Beautiful, Neil thought distractedly.
She was unutterably beautiful.
The breeze gently tossed the locks of her glorious hair. The woman—the memory—raised her eyes to meet Neil’s stare from across the mossy bones and the gurgling stream. Something in her expression—faithful, enduring, and fierce—reminded him of his sister.
Song and laughter mingled with the clash of iron. The copper tang of blood danced through the fragrance of blooming flowers.
Her gaze blazed with flame, binding Neil with a rope of gold—body and mind, soul and desire. In that moment, he belonged to her so completely, it threatened to break him apart with joy and terror.
She carried something in her hand, her grip loose and restful. Neil still understood, beyond any doubt, that she knew exactly how to use it.
“She has a bow,” he croaked, forcing the words from his lips.
“Who?” Constance pressed.
"The woman with the stars in her eyes,” Neil rasped in return.
The vision who owned his soul raised up her other hand. She held it at the height of her shoulder, palm facing out—a solemn salute that pierced him from across space and time.
Neil lifted his hand in return, mirroring her gesture.
It felt like a promise.
Her gaze was black and wild, howling with rage and justice and hope.
Something itched at the corner of Neil’s eye. He blinked against the feeling, and the woman was gone.
“Neil?” Constance pressed from beside him.
Tears traced down his cheeks, cool against the warmth of the afternoon. Neil dashed at them automatically, then stared down in surprise at the moisture on his hand.
Constance watched him carefully. “Why were you making a mudra?”
“A mudra?” Neil echoed, lost.
“With your hand.” Constance raised her arm, turning her palm out to face him. “Aai taught it to me. This one is for fearlessness—and protection.”
Her gaze flicked to Neil’s shoulder, where Dyrnwyn’s hilt poked up from its scabbard.
Neil reeled. “She did it. The woman. I… I just…”
Constance touched his arm. “What woman? Who did you see?”
His hands were shaking. He stared down at them in surprise as the answer burst out of him. “She was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. And she was terrifying.”
Constance gazed across the ravine as though she could see some echo of what had once been there. “That sounds like… someone I might have heard of before.”
Neil’s mind burned with eyes like flame and a beauty that could have cut through him, bone and flesh and sinew, and still leave him aching for more.
“Whoever she was,” he replied carefully, “I feel rather certain that she has what we’re looking for.”
The columns by the rock-cut chamber across the gorge were cracked and weathered with time. The sunlight was gone. Charcoal clouds roiled overhead as Borthwick’s men moved past the curving shadows of the bones.
Constance’s eyes flashed with determination. “Then let’s get our friends and find it.”