Chapter 9
The burden is heavy. It will go against everything you've done to survive. But it’s the only path to freedom.
— ALARIC SARE’S PAPERS FOR EMBERLINE ARKOVA
Charon growled low as Hart finished his story.
“Relax, Charon. I didn’t read the papers.” Then he glanced at me. “But I can guess where you need to go next.”
The breath left my lungs. Was this another secret? Another, quieter voice acknowledged that there was no way Hart could have told me everything about his life in the few days we’d known each other, leading up to the Blessing Ceremony.
My broken heart seemed uninterested in rationality.
“Explain yourself, Cursed.”
Hart held his hands up in a gesture of peace. He spoke directly to me. “I wasn’t keeping it from you. I had no idea it was relevant. Alaric had me run all kinds of weird errands. This was simply the first.”
“You didn’t read it?” I asked, refolding the papers.
He shook his head.
“Why not?”
“Ava convinced me not to. She said stealing secrets was no way to start a partnership.”
“Keeping secrets doesn’t help, either,” I replied almost automatically. My hand lurched to cover my mouth and shove the words back in. They weren’t what I had intended to say. They revealed too much. That I cared. That what he’d done had hurt.
I stilled my hand. I’d only read through Alaric’s words once.
They spoke of a way out. They spoke of …
trials that required both Hart and me. The nature of the trials was unsatisfactory in its explanation, like many of Alaric’s answers had been in life.
I’d need to study them a hundred more times, but one thing was clear.
To be successful, Hart and I would have to work together.
Alaric’s words picked at my defenses. It was as if he’d known we would only be existing around each other at this point. The pages claimed I’d need to truly trust Hart for this to work. If I had any intention of attempting this path Alaric described, I needed to hear Hart’s response.
Hart only waited for my gaze to meet his. “I know, Ember. And I’m sorry. I never meant to keep it from you for so long.”
He didn’t call me Chaos. His voice was the gentlest I’d heard since we arrived. I hated both facts. The sincerity was more than I could handle. I wanted to walk away, to distance myself from his acknowledgement that he’d been wrong.
A million questions filled my head. Why did you? Who else knows? Was I just a convenient distraction in your games? Maybe whatever Alaric wanted us to do was doomed to fail because I couldn’t force any of my questions out.
Hart’s stare never left me, even when my face flooded with embarrassment, and I had to look away. Those forest green eyes seemed painfully aware of every question I pushed down. His unblinking gaze begged me to release them.
I couldn’t.
“Where do you think we need to go next?” I asked instead.
His eyes closed momentarily, and he looked up to the sky. I used to think that when he did this, he requested patience from a goddess he didn’t believe in. Now, I didn’t know what it meant.
“I want to work together on whatever this is.” Resolved, he crossed his strong arms over his chest.
The fact that he even made the statement proved he hadn’t read Alaric’s notes. There was no need to demand that we work together. The trials Alaric had discovered required it.
Something inside me wanted to needle him. The feeling hadn’t been present since before the throne room. I leaned into it. “Are you blackmailing me again?”
“I’d say my objective now is the same as then.
” His smirk was there and gone before I could think through the words.
“Come on, Chaos. We haven’t found a way out in Delphine’s journals.
Not even Linia seems to have information on other Champions.
The attack proves that we’re running out of time.
And to no one’s surprise, Alaric has more secrets for us to uncover. ”
Charon’s scaled nose pressed beneath my hand, which had fallen to my side. This time, I thought he spoke only to me. “As much as I enjoy seeing the Cursed beg for anything, are you going to tell him?”
What choice did I have?
Looking at Hart made me want to scream. I wanted to bite something. I wanted to do anything but what Alaric described in these pages. Being around each other was bad enough. Actively working together seemed impossible.
I swallowed it all down and tucked it in that stupid box inside my chest—it was filling fast. “What do you want to know?”
“What did Alaric plan?”
My exhale was heavy. “He found a way out.”
His brow raised. “Out?”
I nodded, knowing it was vague. “That’s what he said. If he knew this much—the details of our arrival in Linia—I have to assume he knew why we fled here, our curse. This has to be a way to break it.”
Hart looked thoughtful, but he didn’t contradict me.
“Do you know the conditions under which Lucinda was meant to give me the papers?” It was important for me to control the message on this part. I did not … I couldn’t even think the word that Lucinda had used.
He shook his head.
“She was only to give me the book if I arrived in Linia with Themis’s Champion, and if I appeared not to want his death.”
My cheeks heated at the lie. I understood the irony of keeping something from him now, but this piece of information seemed irrelevant. Queen Lucinda couldn’t know whether…
I couldn’t even finish the sentence. A lie or not, I wouldn’t be able to repeat what the queen had said to me. This was the best I could do.
Hart’s smirk broke free, and I wanted to throw something at him. If that was his reaction to my statement, it reinforced my decision not to say more. “And?” he pressed.
“Where did you deliver the adamas pendant?”
He tilted his head in thought. “Whatever it was, it was in a leather bag. I … left it somewhere.” He glanced at Charon.
Charon eyed Hart suspiciously, but I didn’t let them bicker yet.
“‘Shared emotion they wield, emotion they can no longer hide, only emotion shared will change the tides,’” I repeated the words Alaric wrote. They read like the riddles I now knew mother had written in Champions of Kavios.
Hart held my gaze but didn’t speak. I knew where his thoughts had gone—the one place I didn’t want to acknowledge. I wondered if my anger at the situation or my sadness at finding another task Alaric had left me unprepared for were more prevalent to Hart’s senses.
“What do you think that means?” He tried and failed to hide the tip of his lip.
I shook my head and turned the paper toward Hart.
He’d moved close enough to see the sketch.
“This is the pendant Alaric says we need.” It was elaborate, even for him.
The design made it appear to be mainly gold—a pendant shaped like a throne with a dragon wrapped around it.
Within the shape of the throne, six gems were tucked away, and the dragon’s eye held a seventh. I had no doubt the gems were adamas.
“Seven, not six?” Hart asked.
I nodded, still unsure myself what that meant. “He calls it the Trials of the Cursed.”
Hart ran his fingers through his hair slowly, considering. “And does it say how these trials are to be completed?”
“Not much more than I read.” I handed him the papers. “He warns that it will go against every instinct I have. But it’s the only path to freedom.”
“Well, then…” Hart skimmed the pages, then his glance shifted uncomfortably to Charon. “Did you and Scarlett meet?”
Smoke rose from Charon’s nostrils, and he showed his teeth. “Do not say what I think you’re going to say.”
“Alaric instructed me to leave the leather bag in Scarlett’s hoard.”
Charon reluctantly flew toward the mountain range north of the city.
The summits were high; the tips appeared to reach for the clouds.
Sharp ridges only increased the treacherous terrain, and this close to the sea, less greenery littered the landscape.
It looked so different from home, even though it was part of the same mountain range that circled Kavios.
There was no question that Charon knew where to go, taking us deeper into the peaks. The mention of Scarlett’s hoard had been enough.
“Have you flown this way while we’ve been in the library?” I asked.
“Did you tell the Cursed the true conditions for receiving the trial instructions?” Charon responded.
My cheeks pinked, and not from the wind whipping around us as we flew. I didn’t know how to respond. Even if the question was asked only to me, my answer would give information I didn’t want to share with Hart. “Why does it matter?”
Charon banked left, and when I rolled backward to steady myself, I bumped into the hard body behind me.
“Careful,” Hart growled as his hands caught my hips to hold me in place.
My cheeks heated for a different reason.
I had done everything in my power to forget how often this had happened on our trip to Linia.
Staying in the city, in the same rooms, may not have granted me the physical distance I had hoped for, but it at least meant we weren’t astride a dragon together every day.
“If Alaric passed on the requirements to the Queen of Linia, they must be important,” Charon grumbled.
I flinched at the mention of all Alaric had done. It almost made me glad Hart held me steady, as momentarily I wanted to fold in on myself. I still wasn’t sure if I should be angry or happy that Alaric had more schemes. Amidst everything else, I hadn’t expected Charon to press on this. “Low blow.”
“Don’t mind him,” Hart said. “He’s just nervous. He doesn’t remember how to talk to others.”
Charon’s teeth snapped. “Excuse me if my social skills crumbled while I was held hostage in a mine for hundreds of years. Thanks for that, by the way.”
It felt like a wild animal burrowed beneath my skin as I realized Hart responded to what I had believed to be a private conversation. Annoyed with Charon, I went on the offensive. “Do either of you know Scarlett?”