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Alyra screeched before us.
Not her usual light squeal, the sound I knew so well – not a simple attempt to draw my intention. This was a cry of fear. Ofpain. I whipped around so fast I nearly sprained my ankle again, squinting to make sense of the dusky world around us as I hurried forward – undamaged walls, boring sandy floor …
But some ten yards away, below the spot where Alyra was fluttering desperately, that same floor seemed to have … wrinkled.
Like a sheet of parchment folding in.
Panicked flashes of her bird thoughts reached me, interspersed with a burning, throbbing agony I felt echoing in the toes of my own left foot. Creon caught up with me the next moment, red sparking from his fingertips and pulverizing that oddly creased layer of sand. Below, the dark shape of a basin appeared, filled to the brim with a sickly yellow fluid.
Feet. A pliable layer of fake earth, built to fold as soon as anyone placed their weight upon it. That ominous fluid below, steaming lightly …
‘Acid,’ Creon muttered next to me, his lip curling slightly. ‘Inelegant.’
Alyra flapped onto my shoulder with another miserable cry, balancing clumsily on one claw as she held out the other. One of her talons looked oddly raw, the nail bleached pale, the leathery skin peeled back like melting wax. She was hopping about so much that my first two hurried attempts to heal her missed their mark; my third finally found its target, restoring the burned skin while the nail kept its unnatural faded colour.
She collapsed onto my shoulder with a sound strangely like a whimper, curling up in the hollow of my neck. Enough traps for her, her thoughts informed me; if I insisted on traipsing through this hellhole, perhaps Prince Big Wings over there could start pulling his weight and step into the next pit of poison by himself?
Fuck.
I couldn’t blame her … but how were we going to get through this swiftlyandalive without her instincts to keep us safe?
Behind us, I caught shreds of voices, shouting at each other to move.
‘Em?’ Creon said tightly. ‘Could you restore the trap? Very, very small amount of blue, enough to heal just the upper skin of the floor they dug away.’
It took even less blue than I expected. The resulting layer of lookalike earth was flimsy as parchment; I couldn’t suppress a shiver at the thought of what may have happened if Alyra had been any heavier.
‘Good.’ He stepped forward, pressed the glowing dagger into my hands, and hoisted me into his arms without warning. Alyra grumpily fluttered off my shoulder. ‘Hold on tight.’
The next moment he’d jumped, with a powerful beat of his wings – enough to reach the safe side of the acid basin, leaving the trap for our pursuers. Then he didn’t stop walking. Long, reckless strides, towards the shadows gaping before us, carrying me around the corner so swiftly I barely had the wits to object.
‘Creon! Creon, you can’t just—’
‘I know.’ A few more strides and he lowered me to my feet, face tight as he scanned the dark corridor around us. ‘Figured they wouldn’t do two traps directly after each other, and I wanted us out of mage’s reach if anyone steps into that acid bath. What do we do?’
‘Try to get out of this tunnel and into the world above?’ I wryly suggested.
He looked up, wings twitching with agitation. ‘The city will be swarming with fae.’
‘But at least it won’t havetraps, will it?’
‘No,’ he muttered. ‘No, but …’
The look on his face was alarming – a puzzled line between his brows, the same look he’d get when he couldn’t figure out a thorny mathematical problem. Right now, that expression made me want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him to hurry up; we didn’t havetimefor meticulous thinking, damn it.
‘What is it?’ I managed.
‘These traps.’ A curt gesture of his head at the one we’d left behind. ‘They don’t really seem her style, do they?’
Did they?
Mud, iron, and poison. Nothing like the shield we’d found around the Cobalt Court, impossible to pass without a key or godsworn magic. Nothing like the blood mark, as gruesome as it was effective, another vicious yet sophisticated demonstration of the Mother’s unmatched powers.
These traps … A human could have set them up.
And now that he pointed it out, it seemed unlikely Achlys and Melinoë would ever stoop to using mortal strategies.
‘So what are you thinking?’ My heart was pounding in my throat. ‘That the traps may already have been here before her army arrived?’
