Chapter 14
I peered through a peephole at the brightly lit stairs leading to Light House’s entrance hall.
This was as close as we’d been able to get.
The Earth Shard had supposedly carved these passages long ago—or rather, a house head must have worked with the Shard to do so, since the magic of the old gods seemed to work in symbiosis with the princes and princesses—but house territory was sacrosanct.
There would be no tunneling in or out of Light House itself.
The stairs bustled with activity as Noble Fae and Underfae came and went.
The atmosphere was palpably tense, full of lowered voices and furtive looks.
Light House was in conflict right now—Torin and Rowena positioning themselves with Imogen, Gweneira aligning herself with the rebel faction, and each with a portion of the whole loyal to them.
“Anything?” Kallen whispered.
I shook my head and stepped aside to let him take a turn.
He moved into place, hunching slightly to put his eye to the wall. After a while, his shoulders tensed. I leaned in, wishing there was room for both of us. “What is it?” I asked quietly.
“Soldiers,” he said, stepping aside to let me look.
Six Noble Fae were walking two by two down the stairs.
One wore white leather, but the remaining five were more heavily armored than most soldiers I’d seen, with golden breastplates, greaves, and gauntlets beneath snowy white capes.
Their round-topped helmets covered the top half of their heads, with a thin strip of metal extending from the browband over the nose, and their sword belts also held knives and what looked like small metal nets dangling from hooks.
Several were carrying bulging fabric sacks, and as they passed, I heard a faint clinking sound.
Kallen tugged my arm, pulling me gently away from the wall. We headed back down the tunnel, stopping periodically to look through other openings to make sure we were keeping pace with the soldiers.
“Do you think they’re patrolling?” I asked at one point as we waited for them to catch up.
Our route didn’t match theirs perfectly, since the tunnels twisted and changed elevation unexpectedly, and we’d gained time by climbing down a ladder to the intersection where Light House’s stairs met the public areas.
There were a few pinprick holes here, so it was possible for both of us to look at once.
“Could be. I don’t like the look of those bags they’re carrying, though. I would bet they’re laying traps or scoping out ambush spots for when the Accord ends.”
Thinking about ambushes made me think of strange things that could happen in the dark. “Torin and Rowena threatened me if I didn’t support Imogen.”
“Did they?” Kallen glanced quickly at me. “I saw you speaking with them at the dinner.”
Of course he had. He’d probably been skulking around, listening in on conversations. He hadn’t asked about my attempt to recruit new house members, but his network of spies had probably already told him about the people who had shown up on my doorstep.
“They can’t murder another house head during the Accord, can they?” I asked. “The attack at Earth House was before it had technically started.”
Kallen leaned back against the wall, arms crossed, while I alternated between looking at him and peeking out at the corridor. “There may still be violence, Kenna. You should be ready.”
Dismay sank in my gut like a stone. “I thought it was a mandatory peace period.”
“No, it is the appearance of a mandatory peace period.”
I sighed, rubbing my forehead. “I hate faerie riddles.”
“It’s not a riddle. Fae politics have layers.
The Accord accomplishes one major goal—preventing all-out war on a grand scale until everyone is ready for it.
If that war can be negotiated around, so much the better.
But we are very much still battling for supremacy, and if you, Hector, or Drustan can be eliminated or recruited to Imogen’s side without causing her supporters to turn on her, that will place her in a stronger position. ”
“So we’re going to be smiling at each other at parties, all while secretly trying to manipulate or kill each other?”
“Precisely.” His lips twitched. “Much like any other faerie party.”
I started to roll my eyes at that, then caught the flash of torchlight against a gold breastplate. “They’re here,” I whispered.
The soldiers reached the base of the stairs.
Four of them split off, two heading in either direction to stand guard.
The remaining two faeries—a golden-armored male faerie and the female soldier wearing leather, who I assumed was their leader—knelt and began fishing through their bags, pulling out smooth, circular pieces of what looked like glass or crystal.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
Kallen was watching through his own spy hole. “Shoring up defenses.”
Confused, I watched the faeries turn to face the archway that separated this main hallway from the stairs leading to Light House.
The stone around it was intricately carved.
Two mouthless Underfae flanked the door, their robed stone bodies glittering with flecks of mica.
Their feathered wings curved to meet over the entrance, and the design was crowned by a sun whose rays shot jaggedly in all directions.
The art was beautiful but unsettling, because scattered through the figures’ wings and all around them were dozens of carved eyes.
Light was the house of order and justice. Casting light on darkness—or so they liked to believe—and always watching for crimes in need of correcting.
Some of the irises and pupils had been carved with precision, but others were holes recessed into the rock.
The soldier wearing white leather fitted a piece of crystal into one of those hollows.
Her companion joined her, doing the same to another, then another, until twelve eyes had been filled with crystal or glass.
The leather-armored soldier pressed her hand to a gap in the wall.
Her skin turned an illuminated, translucent red, the veins standing out starkly, and then beams of light shot out from the crystal-capped hollows, so painfully bright I closed my eyes.
The afterimage showed twelve reddened lines at different angles.
A trap. If a Light faerie with strong magic focused their power into whatever empty space was behind that stone wall, bouncing it off mirrors or bending it mystically in some way I couldn’t understand, those beams would hit the curved pieces of glass.
And as I’d seen at the summer solstice, light concentrated through a lens could kill.
The house entrance would do the same thing to intruders if they were foolish enough to get that close, but Light House was preparing for conflict in the public areas, too. The lenses blended in well—if no one realized the carvings around Light House had changed, it would be a nasty surprise.
The soldiers moved on, and we followed. A few times we lost them due to deviations between the tunnels and the main corridors, but Kallen knew Mistei far better than I did, and he had a sense of where they might be heading.
Between my knowledge of the catacombs and his knowledge of everything else, we were able to catch up to them on the ramp near Blood House.
Kallen and I watched through a narrow line of metal mesh at the edges of a painting bolted into the wall.
I’d seen the art before—an image of a battlefield, bright with blood and framed in silver.
The mesh was finely wrought, and from the other side it looked like an artistic embellishment at the edge of the frame.
A hidden door glimmered beside us, and I quietly pointed it out to Kallen.
The soldiers had been placing lenses in small hollows throughout Mistei—Earth House wasn’t the only one keeping secrets—and the leader’s bag was empty. She tossed it aside, then gestured at one of the other soldiers.
The second faerie placed his sack on the floor. The fabric shifted.
Something was alive in there.
He knelt to open the bag and pulled out a salamander, gleaming black with spots of green. It writhed under his gauntleted grip, four-toed feet flexing. Its eyes shone the same toxic green, and when it opened its mouth, a clear, viscous liquid dripped out.
The faerie dropped it. Then he pulled out his knife and skewered it.
I twitched at the sudden violence. The blade pinned the salamander to the ground, and as the faerie pressed down, his unarmored companion bent to whisper something to the creature, words I could only half make out in a language I’d never heard before.
Kallen cursed, low and rough.
“What are they doing?” I asked, fear starting to beat at my throat and wrists.
“It’s poisonous. They’re casting a spell to make it attack.”
Rowena poisoned the servants, I remembered sickly. “Attack who?”
Then I heard the whisper of my name across the air.
Kallen unsheathed his sword, then reached for the door before I realized what was happening. “Open it,” he ordered me.
“But—”
“Open it!”
“There are six of them,” I argued. “There are only two of us.”
“If they release that thing, it’s going to find a place to hide, and then it will be singularly driven to find you.
It’s called the bonebreaker salamander, Kenna.
” He gripped my arm, fingers digging in.
“A single drop of venom against your skin and your muscles will seize so hard your bones break. You’ll heal and rebreak yourself over and over, and all that time, the poison will work its way through your skin and into your veins. When it reaches your heart…”
He didn’t need to say more. I yanked the door open.