CHAPTER 8
The first official challenge was only hours away and I hadn’t been able to get a wink of sleep all night. I had tossed and turned, until finally crossing the hallway to Lana’s bedroom and knocking softly on her door. She’d answered immediately.
Now I sat at the foot of her bed, clutching a pillow to my chest. We’d been fully dressed for hours – in fleece-lined leathers and thick winter coats, because we didn’t need the threat of hypothermia to add to our problems – waiting for the challenge to start.
Nausea roiled in the pit of my stomach. My queasiness had nothing to do with the pepper steak pie I had eaten at dinner the previous night, and everything to do with the gnawing dread that something terrible was about to happen.
It felt like tiny spiders were crawling across my skin, every small sound in the passageway enough to make me whip my head to the door in fresh panic.
“Stop looking at the door. You’re going to make me vomit,” Lana groaned, covering her head with a pillow.
A knock sounded and both Lana and I’s heads swiveled to stare at the door. Lana’s face was tinged a sickly shade of green as she crossed to the peephole and looked out. Her shoulders drooped in relief as she unlatched the door. “It’s only Moric and Anama.”
The others crossed into the room, both also fully dressed.
“How long have you been waiting?” Moric asked, sliding against Lana’s dresser to sit on the floor. Anama remained by the door, a nervous look on her face.
“Since midnight,” I said.
“Do you think they’ll allow us to take any supplies with us?” Moric asked.
“Doubtful,” Lana responded.
We sat in tense silence, the only sound that of our sprites’ soft snores blending harmoniously.
They were ethereal even in sleep, I noted, staring down at where Calendula rested on my thigh.
She had given me a few pointers on the survival challenge, warning me to keep hidden during the night, not draw attention to myself by starting a fire no matter how cold it was, and to always stay alert.
The survival challenge did not require brute strength or mental reasoning; it tested a mortal’s instinctual senses, she had said.
I tried to divert my thoughts to greener pastures, but no welcome distraction came to mind.
I had sealed the entire bedroom encounter with Kilian in a lock box and thrown away the key, refusing to allow myself the opportunity to think about just how close I had come to rising on my toes and kissing him.
What was wrong with me? He was an asshole, he was elven and he was my instructor.
And entirely too mysterious for my own good.
Besides, there were virtually zero odds of me passing the Rite. I was mortal. There was no future here.
The only good thing to come from that encounter was that the link had been eerily quiet ever since. Anger no longer bubbled in my throat, threatening to spill out of my mouth into hateful words directed at everyone, and I no longer felt like my skin was on fire.
“Do you hear that?” Lana asked, sitting straighter.
Anama nodded. “Yes. It’s faint but it almost sounds like…”
I cocked my head to the right, where a soft melody seemed to waft beneath the door and through the cracks in the floorboards. “It sounds like music.”
“Cover your–” Anama began, but it was too late.
The music was enchanting. It filled my head, leaving room for nothing else.
It felt like lush gardens and vinery, bare feet on dewy grass.
Violin strings sang a melancholy tune of loss and heartbreak, the uplifting lilt at the end of each note a promise for a new beginning.
It felt like magical places and forbidden spaces.
A stolen kiss at the end of time, or an old god coming home.
It was both haunting and exhilarating and I did not notice when my eyes glazed over and the others became blurry shapes of color.
I was so lost in the melody, I did not register leaving Lana’s bedroom, or trudging down the stairwell.
And I definitely did not comprehend that despite all our research and preparation, we had failed to protect ourselves at the very start of the challenge.
I knew I had snapped out of the trance when I heard birds chirping overhead. I had been so ensorcelled by the elven tune that it had blocked out all other noise – even my own thoughts.
I came to, my eyes blinking the haze from my mind.
The mental fog cleared to reveal densely packed trees surrounding me so completely that only patches of sky shone through the dark leaves.
Anama and Moric stood to my left, Lana to my right.
All of them looked as confused as I felt.
Lana peered up at the trees while Anama scanned the ground.
“You were right, Lirah. We’re in the Forests of Dalhur,” Moric said.
“It looks like it’s nearly midday. We must have been walking for hours. Did I ever mention how much I hate these Trials?” Lana muttered, stretching her legs out.
“Where are our sprites?” Moric asked, searching his pockets. I checked my own cloak, but Calendula was nowhere to be found.
“Maybe they’re not allowed to help us during this challenge?” Lana suggested, studying the trees, probably for a flicker of gold.
Anama dropped to her knees, her fingers sifting at the soil a few feet ahead.
“What are you doing?” Moric asked, looking at Anama like she had finally lost it.
“This is freshly tilled soil.” She stared at the ground. “Something’s buried down here.”
“Maybe it should stay buried?” Moric suggested, uncomfortable at the prospect of potentially unearthing a rotting carcass.
“No.” I fell beside Anama, sinking my hands into the soil. There had to be a reason why we were brought here. “Something was put here for us to find.”
I clawed at the ground until my fingers hit cold metal.
Anama found something at the same time. She pulled out a piece of parchment covered in sand.
I dug the metal object out, pulling it by a long chain.
It was a hexagonal shape and had a clasp where the item opened.
The metal was burnished, and its intricate swirls and whorls were rubbed off in certain places.
I knew what it was as soon as I unlatched the clasp.
“A compass,” Moric breathed over my shoulder.
“And this is a map,” Anama announced. She pointed to a large red X marked near the top left corner.
“Thank the gods. We have our challenge,” Lana said.
“Where are we?” I asked, squinting at the map.
“It doesn’t say.”
“I shouldn’t have expected anything less,” I grumbled, wondering whether it was Septimus or Kilian who set this challenge. Or perhaps it had been Echon, eager for us to wander lost and confused in the Forests of Dalhur, with evening swiftly approaching.
“Anyone any good at map reading?” Lana asked.
Moric shuffled. “I wouldn’t say I’m good at it, but I used to make them for my younger brother.
Sometimes, when he missed our parents or had a bad day at school, I’d hide silly trinkets around the garden and make a map for him to decipher.
Once, for his birthday, I made one that spanned our entire village. ”
I bit back my comment that his brother was lucky to have him; it wasn’t a compassionate thing to say when Moric had been wrenched away from his home, not knowing whether he would ever see his sibling again. Instead, I said, “That’s more experience than I have.”
Anama and Lana nodded their agreement, Anama passing the map to Moric. “Walk us through it.”
He dropped to one knee on the soil and placed the map flat on the ground, smoothing out its wrinkles.
His nose scrunched as he studied it. He pointed his index finger to an illustrated diagram of mountainous peaks.
“Those are the summits.” His finger dipped an inch, to a sketch of a house nestled between the jagged formations.
“And that must be Valhan House. If we follow the trail from there across this road, that should be Pyxis.” The structure Moric pointed to vaguely resembled the library, with its tall, symmetrical shape.
“We know the Forests of Dalhur act as a natural border separating Lomask to the south and Dalhur to the north.”
Moric’s fingers skipped across the map to a line of illustrated trees, nearly bisecting the map in half.
Near the bottom of the trees, a river snaked all the way across the land toward the Green Sea.
He ran his finger along the line of trees, which had to represent the forest. “This would place us somewhere here. The problem is, I don’t exactly know where we are on this line.
But look at this–” He indicated a cluster of circles between the top and middle half of the line.
“I’d bet you anything those are a network of caves.
That’s our best bet of surviving the night and the only way to mark where we are on this map.
It’s not too far from the checkpoint, either. ”
The X, which presumably marked the point we were meant to reach, was marked right at the apex of the line, near the top of the map. To get there we would have to pass the caves, and only then would we know for sure if we were on the right track.
“The issue is…” I started, meeting Moric’s hazel eyes.
He nodded, his expression grim.
“We don’t know which direction to head in,” Lana finished.
The map did not contain a compass key to follow. We had to find a landmark to know whether we were going the right way. And that meant picking a direction and simply walking.
It sounded simple in theory, but… nightfall would come in a few hours, and I knew we were not the only creatures roaming these woods. A chill rose the hairs on my neck.
I looked to Anama, undoubtedly the wisest amongst us. “Which way do you think we should go?”
She gave the question some thought, and then said, “Most infrastructure, both man-made and natural, leans toward the rising sun. The sun rises in the west. That’s where the caves should be.”
The trees around us were so dense I could barely see the sky, let alone the setting sun.