Chapter 8
Chapter
Eight
The Veil takes her.
Her distress hits me before the air has closed behind her. I'm already moving.
"Wait." Seraphina's hand is on my arm. "It needs a moment to reopen."
"She's hurting," I say.
"I know."
"She's hurting now."
"Maximus."
I stop moving.
Mira is at my other side, hands in fists. "Is she okay?"
"She'll be okay," Seraphina tells her. "The crossing is hardest the first time."
Mira nods once, eyes on the Veil.
Seraphina lifts her hand from my arm.
"Go."
I cross.
The cold takes me first, a compression that starts at the skin and pushes inward through muscle and bone. My body resists. Every reflex I've earned pushes back against the crossing.
Then my shadows wake. All of them. They surge through my chest and along my arms and strain against my skin, reaching for the other side of the Veil.
The Veil lets me go.
Celeste is on her knees in the grass, ten paces ahead.
I'm beside her before I've thought about the steps. One hand at the small of her back. The other gathering her hair off her neck.
"I'm fine," she says, before I can ask. "Just the crossing."
"I felt it."
"I know."
Her ring catches the light when she lowers her hand. The M and C crest bright against the gold.
"Can you stand?"
"Give me a second."
I look around.
The grass under me is the wrong color, a deep emerald that glows faintly from inside.
The sky is layered: blue overhead, and behind it a second blue, darker, carrying veins of gold that branch and fade and reappear.
Mountains rise at the horizon. Three ranges stacked, each larger than the last, and the stone of them is producing its own light, an amber glow that traces the ridgelines and bleeds upward into the sky.
The air is thick with magic. Different from the kind Seraphina builds into her wards. This is environmental. Structural. As fundamental as oxygen.
Light. The kind that has weight. It doesn't burn. It presses. The magic in it is saturated. Ambient. The shadows under my skin lean toward it.
They settle.
I think about the cracked cup at the Accords signing. The pressure behind my sternum I couldn't locate. The same force is here. My shadows responding the way they responded to the cup.
Behind us, the Veil opens.
Seraphina steps through. The grass beneath her feet deepens a shade.
Then Mira.
She stops two paces in. Her body goes rigid.
The grass around her feet brightens.
Seraphina rests a palm on her daughter's shoulder. Neither of them speaks.
Celeste's hand finds mine. She squeezes once.
Then she pushes herself up. I rise with her, my hand at her back the whole way.
She sways. Small. A shift in balance that lasts half a second before she corrects it.
"This way," Seraphina says.
Seraphina starts walking, and the realm answers her.
A flagstone surfaces under her foot before her foot touches the ground. Gray-white, smooth, edges fitted to the grass like it's always been there. Another rises ahead of it. Then another. The green folds back where each stone arrives. She doesn't look down.
Mira follows at her right shoulder. Heat shimmer rises above the stones beneath her feet, the kind of warp that comes off summer pavement. The grass at the path's edge brightens where she passes. Mira keeps her eyes forward and her hands at her sides. Her fingers are spread.
Celeste steps onto the path beside me. The gray-white veins in the stone beneath her foot pulse once, slow. Then they go still. The stone holds her weight like ordinary rock.
I take the next step.
The stone beneath my foot is cold. Cooler than the grass it's surfacing through. The shadows under my skin stir. Quieter now.
The four of us walk in a loose diamond. Seraphina ahead. Mira at her shoulder. Celeste beside me. The path forms under all of us, one stone at a time, exactly as far as we need and no further. Behind us, the grass closes over the trail like water closing over a thrown rock.
Trees line the approach. Trunks of pale wood with bark that shimmers, and canopies that move without wind, slow and purposeful, following our movement. Their leaves are silver on one side and deep green on the other and they turn as we walk, showing one face and then the other.
Celeste’s hand goes to the nearest trunk. Her fingers flatten against the bark.
The tree shudders. Every leaf flips silver to green and back. A sound rises from the roots, low and resonant, and Celeste pulls back, fingers curling into a fist.
“It pushed back,” she says. Her voice is even, but she’s flexing her fingers open and closed. “I reached in to find the structure and something came through in the other direction.”
Her gaze tracks from the trunk to the entire line of trees. Every tree has turned to face her directly, canopies tilted, leaves silver-side out.
“The trees are part of the Lithenmere,” Seraphina says from ahead. She doesn’t slow down. “Everything here is connected. You just introduced yourself.”
Celeste doesn’t touch another tree. But the ones we pass afterward lean toward her rather than away.
The ridge drops into a wide valley. A river runs along the floor of it, silver, heavy, the look of mercury poured between the banks. It flows upstream.
Her step falters, just barely, and her eyes follow the current. Her mouth opens. Closes.
We walk for what feels like an hour. The light doesn’t change. There is no sun that I can see. The sky seems to produce its own glow.
The mountains ahead grow larger, slowly.
Seraphina stops at the crest of the second ridge.
Below us, the valley descends into a basin. Circular. Ringed by the mountains. Gold veins in the stone pulse in a rhythm that thrums in my sternum.
At the center of the basin, a magnificent structure.
“The Lithenmere. My father’s palace,” Seraphina says.
The palace rises from the rock of the mountain itself, walls and towers and archways flowing upward from the stone. No seams. No joints. No evidence of tools.
“It wasn’t built or carved,” she says. “The mountain grew it.”
The main structure alone runs a quarter mile across the basin, and below it, visible through gaps in the foundation rock, halls descend into the earth.
The path descends. The stone underfoot changes as we approach the Lithenmere, the temperature rising by degrees, until by the time we reach the base of the outer wall, the surface beneath my boots is warm.
The entrance is an archway three stories tall. The stone at the edges is darker, older, veined with the thickest concentration of gold I’ve seen yet. No doors. No gates. Beyond it, the interior carries its own light.
Seraphina pauses at the threshold.
“The Lithenmere is alive,” she says. Her eyes move to me. Then to Celeste. “It will know you. It will learn you. It will form opinions about you based on criteria you cannot anticipate. It is not hostile. But it is not neutral either.”
Celeste glances at me. “Opinions,” she says. Then she turns to Seraphina. “How old is it?”
“Old.” A pause. “Older than Lanthar. Older than the courts. The mountain was here before the Fae organized themselves into anything resembling a civilization. Lanthar’s line asked it for a palace. It agreed. It has been agreeing, and revising its agreement, ever since.”
She turns back to the archway.
We walk through the archway.
The interior runs hotter than the exterior.
The hall beyond the entrance stretches long and deep, ceiling vaulting upward into shadow, walls smooth and luminous.
The light comes from everywhere and nowhere.
It seems as if the stone itself is producing it.
The floor beneath our feet vibrates at a low frequency that I feel in my ankles, my knees, the base of my spine.
My shadows stir again. The witch-dark in my blood recognizes something in these walls, in this stone, in whatever animates this palace. It reaches for it. Gently this time. Shadows expanding against my skin toward the walls.
The stone answers. The gold threads in the wall nearest to me wake. Fractionally. A response so subtle that if I weren’t watching for it, I would have missed it entirely. The shadows extend toward the gold, and the gold leans back, and then both settle.
I look at my hands. The shadows have retreated, resting just below the surface.
Ahead, the hall widens into a large room. The acoustic shift, the change in air pressure. The ceiling rises. The walls pull back.
“The Heart Chamber,” Seraphina says.
At the center of the immense space, a single tree grows through what appears to be solid granite.
Its trunk is as wide as the courtyard fountain at the compound, bark silver-gray, and its roots thread down into the stone in veins of living gold.
The branches spread across the ceiling in a canopy that catches the light and breaks it into patterns that move, slowly.
Everything in the space is arranged around it.
The gold threads in the roots beat with a rhythm I can count. Steady. Patient. Like a heartbeat.
I stop walking. The others stop with me.
“What is this tree?”
“The heart of the Lithenmere,” Seraphina says. “It was here when Lanthar’s line arrived. It will be here when his line ends.”
Celeste stands beside me. Her eyes are on the tree.
The stone beneath her feet shifts. A tremor.
The floor under her boots darkens a shade, the gold lines pulling back from where she stands, creating a circle of bare stone a foot in diameter.
Then the floor pushes back. The bare stone flushes dark, then darker, and the edges of the circle bow upward.
Celeste’s hands come up. Reflex.
The floor cracks. A single clean line from the circle’s edge to the nearest root. The gold at the crack’s edges blazes white. The temperature spikes and the air tastes like ozone and hot stone.
I reach for her, but Seraphina’s hand catches my arm.
“This is between them,” she says.
Celeste’s body is rigid. The tendons in her neck pull taut. Her boots are planted and her hands are up. Her shoulders tighten. Her fingers shake.
Seraphina’s grip tightens on my arm.
Then Celeste exhales. Long and controlled. She drops her hands and breathes.
The heat recedes. The crack in the floor seals, stone flowing back together as if it were momentarily liquid, and the gold rearranges around her feet in a new pattern, denser in some places, absent in others.
Celeste’s chin lifts. She catches my eye.
“I’m okay,” she says. Her voice doesn’t shake, but her hands do. She folds them behind her back.
Seraphina turns to us. “Wait here.” She rests her palm on Mira’s shoulder. “Come with me.”
She crosses to the far side of the Heart Chamber. Mira follows.
The canopy turns its slow rotation overhead. Light falls through the branches in shifting columns.
I press my hand to the nearest root. The gold is hot under my palm. The heartbeat presses against my skin.
The shadows in my blood answer it. The same low recognition.
I pull back.
Celeste is beside me. Her palm goes to the root where mine was, flat against the same gold, and her eyes close. The gold leans toward her, too. Different pattern. When she opens her eyes she is looking at my hand.
She takes it and wraps her fingers through mine.
We stand like that until a passage forms in the eastern wall.
Smaller than the entrance. The stone pulls apart without sound, revealing a corridor that curves downward, lit softer and deeper than the Heart Chamber.
The air from inside carries the mineral smell of deep stone and something sweeter underneath.
Seraphina glances at it. “Your chambers. The Lithenmere prepared them.”
“My thanks,” I say.
Celeste looks at the passage, then at me. She walks through first. I follow.
The corridor empties into a single room. Carved from luminous stone that throbs faintly with the same rhythm as the tree’s roots. No windows. No doors. The opening we walked through seals behind us, the stone closing over itself.
The walls carry a heat that has nothing to do with fire. The bed is enormous, built from what appears to be the same living rock as the walls, its surface covered in fabrics that catch the light and trap it. When Celeste touches the nearest sheet, it ripples under her fingers.
“The mountain gave us a room,” she says.
“The mountain has opinions.”
She laughs. The glow in the walls deepens. Faintly. The temperature rises slightly.
Celeste sits on the edge of the bed. Tests the surface with her palms. The fabric ripples again, conforming to her weight. She pulls back. Puts her palm down again. Watches it ripple.
“I didn’t know a place like this could exist,” she says.
I sit beside her. The bed adjusts beneath me.
Her hand finds mine between us, and the stone beneath us responds with a single low vibration.
She leans against my shoulder.
She turns her face up to mine. The light off the walls moves across her face. The crescent at her chest pulses bright beneath the fabric, and the answering pulse runs across my own.
Her ring presses into my palm. I lift her hand. Bring her knuckles to my mouth. The ring against my lips. She watches me do it. Her pulse accelerates.
Her free hand comes to my cheek. Her thumb at the corner of my mouth. She turns my face toward her.
Her mouth meets mine. My hand fists in the fabric at her hip.
The kiss is not careful. This is need.
She turns into me, her knee coming up onto the bed, her body folding into mine. Her hand slides up the back of my neck and into my hair. Her teeth catch my lower lip.
The mark on my chest goes hot beneath my shirt.
The walls brighten. The fabric on the bed ripples without being touched.
The wall opens.
A passage appears, half the size of the entrance archway, the edges bright with fresh gold. Beyond it, a corridor descends, curving left, lit by the stone’s own glow.
Seraphina stands in the new opening. Mira beside her.
“Really, Uncle Max?”
Celeste laughs quietly against my mouth. The sound goes into me before she pulls back.
She does not turn her head toward the doorway. Her hand is still in my hair. Her breath is uneven.
“Later,” she says. Quiet. To me only.
“Later.” I close my hand over hers where it rests against my chest.
She lowers her knee from the bed. Turns to face them.
I look at Mira over the top of Celeste’s head.
“The mountain could have given a little warning,” I say.
“I doubt you would’ve noticed if it did,” she retorts.
Seraphina’s mouth does the thing it does when she is trying not to smile. She doesn’t succeed.
“Lanthar is waiting,” she says. The smile gets more visible. “He has waited three hundred years. I imagine he can wait three more minutes.”
Celeste’s mouth comes to my ear.
“I need a lot more than three minutes to do what I want to do to you,” she whispers. “So this will definitely have to wait.”
Heat moves through me like a wildfire.
She pulls back. Adjusts the front of her shirt. Walks toward the passage without looking back at me.
I follow.