Chapter 26 Rhiannon #2
Whatever he said to the guardians was poetry. The whispering coalesced as Eryx spoke, lowering to a dull roar, a kind of humming. It didn’t take me long to realize the song was the one Lara had hummed to me earlier.
A hymn of Otrera. A hymn to the union between Tanith and Amarante. Death and immortal life, embodied, their union one we considered most sacred on the island. Amarante and Tanith both had to bless the creation of the Maere before my mother would perform the ritual.
Very few people actually knew that. But the dead knew. The dead knew more than we gave them credit for. My blood chilled at the thought.
The spirits in corpse garb disappeared. Eryx turned to Lara and I and beckoned us forward. “I told them what we were here for.”
“Thank you.” Lara nodded, gratitude shining in her eyes. “Which passageway takes us to the island?”
Eryx smiled at me. His gaze was steady, confident. “Well?”
He thought I should know. He trusted me to choose.
As I’d done many times in the past few weeks to see the truth of things, I reached behind me, grasping the hilt of my sword. It sang against my spine at my touch, so I drew it.
Lara’s eyes lit with interest as I did. “Yes,” she hissed. “Like a dowsing rod!”
My smile was faint, my eyes still locked with Eryx’s. “Yes.”
He nodded, clearly agreeing with me about my course of action.
I began to rotate at the center of the room.
At the third opening from my left, my sword began to hum.
At the fourth, it lit up. To experiment, I kept going, Eryx and Lara both nodding as they tracked my movements.
At the fifth opening, my sword went dark.
The fourth it was, then. “This is the way,” I murmured.
There were no sconces in this part of the Ossuary, and the light from the crossroads disappeared as the tiled floor gave way to a crunching gravel beneath our feet.
Lara drew her own sword, breathing some inner power I didn’t understand into it until it glowed faintly red and shed light onto the ground.
I had to suppress the gasp that rose up my throat, chased by bile. We were walking on bone shards. We were walking on the bones of our people.
Lara’s eyes met mine, tears welling. “So many,” she whispered.
Eryx hung his head, turning his face slightly away from us as he wiped his eyes. “Too many. Always too many of us, and not enough of them.”
Lara gripped his shoulder, her fingers digging into the thick, corded muscle. “Always.”
He looked up, first at her. They nodded to one another like comrades in arms. Then his gaze moved slowly to me. “But never you.”
And then he smiled, as though the thought that I would never die was the one comforting thing he could think of. Every part of me stopped. My heart, my breath, my mind. That smile was the purest thing I’d ever seen in my life—and it was for me.
Lara grinned, wicked as a fox, and then laughed as she continued walking, holding her sword out in front of her. Her shoulders shook with mirth. Always such an asshole. My cheeks flushed with embarrassment as I followed, but I felt a little better.
The passageway we traveled down was musty, smelling of mildew and something else, stale and sweet. A sound of footsteps startled me. Eryx grabbed me by the shoulders. “Don’t look back.”
Lara moved behind me, covering my rear before he’d even finished speaking.
“You either,” he cautioned.
“Got it,” she agreed.
“What is it?” I asked.
He was staring behind us, drawing us slowly forward. “Nothing,” he said. “Keep moving.”
Lara sighed. “Necroline. We’re not babies. We’ve seen our fair share of scary shit, okay?”
“A malefic spirit,” he murmured. “A strong one. I can’t make it out, but I feel it. It will appear differently to all of us, and once you see it, it will have power over you.”
Lara scoffed, but she didn’t sound sure. “You’re looking at it.”
“I’m special.” Eryx grinned at me, but there wasn’t a hint of joy in his face. He was playing a part to get through this. “Come on.”
We walked faster, but the footsteps matched our pace.
A man’s voice began to sing an old song, from the year Cassandra died, about a woman who couldn’t be trusted.
It was meant to be sung to a much faster beat, but the voice sang it to the tempo of a funeral dirge.
Sinister didn’t begin to describe the sound.
Eryx took hold of my hand. “Don’t let go.”
Lara walked faster, walking next to me now. “Who is it, Necroline?”
“Magnus,” he hissed. “It’s Magnus. I’m afraid he’s going to try to take Rhiannon.”
“I’d like to see him fucking try,” Lara snarled.
Eryx nodded resolutely.
Despite the particular intensity of the moment I snorted, snatching my hand out of Eryx’s grip. I lifted my own sword. “The two of you should remember that I am perfectly capable of fighting him myself.”
No one answered me.
The air had changed, the scent now of brine and pine air. We were nearing the island. How that was possible, I didn’t know. Somehow, coming through the crossroads in the Ossuary had been a kind of shortcut. But magic was thick in the air now. “The swords can do more here. Even banish a spirit.”
Eryx glanced down at me, nodding once. “That’s a blessing I hope we don’t have to use.”
All three of us tensed as something approached us, running at full speed in the dark. Lara and I fell into defensive positions on instinct, but relaxed when two familiar faces emerged out of the murky dark. Ember and Calypso.
“They have the queen,” Calypso breathed, panic in her eyes.
I could barely register what she said, my heart racing. We were too late. We’d been too slow, and now they had her.
Ember gripped my shoulders in her hands. “I’m sorry, Rhi. They have your mother and Myrine both. We need to split up. We need to find them.”