Ellie studied the artifact with a deep sense of discomfort.“When Sayyid handed me the Staff of Moses, it felt like a dozen bees were stinging my fingers.”
“Dyrnwyn doesn’t sting,” Neil absently countered.
Adam plucked the arrow from its stone braces.
It glowed, tendrils of light whipping out from the shaft in mingling hues of blue and gold, silver and crimson.The shadows of the temple grew longer and deeper around them, and a dry, strange wind rushed through the close space, making the dead leaves on the ground whirl furiously.
Ellie’s skin tightened.Blood pounded inside her skull like the uneasy pressure of standing near an imminent lightning strike.
Adam very quickly set the arrow back down.
The glow flickered out.The wind died.The shadows went back to normal.
The leaves settled onto the ground with a dry rustle.
“Doesn’t sting,” Adam reported in a tight voice.
Neil had half collapsed behind the altar.He slowly crawled back up, regarding the arrow with a terrified respect.
“It really is the astra,” Constance breathed out.
“If you had dropped that,” Ellie said in a strangled voice, “you might have taken out half of Chhattisgarh.”
“Guessing that means you don’t need to know the mantra to use its leftovers,” Adam deduced uncomfortably.
Constance studied the objects on the altar with bewildered wonder.“Aai has been telling me about Rama and Sita for as long as I can remember—but they were always just stories.”She turned to Ellie, her eyes wide.“Except they weren’t.Because Sita was here.She washere, Ellie.”
Ellie felt the whispering, uncanny awareness that she had once again brushed up against the imprint an extraordinary woman had made on the world.
She remembered golden eyes and a scarred cheek.
You want to know who we were.
Neil’s outburst snapped her back to herself.“But what on earth do we do with it?Borthwick is out in that valley.We can’t take the chance of carrying this with us just to have him take it.And there’s only one way out of this place!”
Ellie recalled the steep, curving walls of the sinkhole.Neil was right.Their only way out of here was to go back through Sita’s cave—and somehow get past Borthwick and his soldiers in the gorge.
“So maybe we don’t carry it out with us,” Adam said grimly.“Maybe we destroy it right here.”
Ellie felt a thrill of horror.“There is no way to destroy it.You can only use it.Which means you’d have to find a target… and that target would be completely obliterated.Even if we just directed it at the ground, we could end up devastating the entire forest.”
“Do any of you know how to shoot an arrow?”Adam asked.
“Don’t you?”Neil pressed back uncomfortably.
“Why would I?I’m usually carrying around a perfectly good Winchester repeater—when someone hasn’t dropped a cave on it,” Adam added with a mischievous look at Ellie.
“I did not drop a cave on your last Winchester,” Ellie tartly corrected.“Borthwick took it.”
“That’s fair,” Adam allowed.
“I know how to shoot an arrow.”
The voice was low, even, and casually threatening.
Ellie whirled toward it to see Jacobs step into the doorway—and level a rifle at her chest.
“And it looks like I have a Winchester as well,” he added darkly.
