I looked at him in surprise. “You're not coming down?”
“No.” He met my gaze steadily. “This part is yours.”
I looked back at the basin. At the waterspouts. At the tunnel entrance in the far rock face, dark and still and waiting.
My magic pressed upward, gently insistent, the way it had pressed all morning.
“How long will you wait?” I asked.
Seryn looked at me steadily. “Until you come out.”
“I could die in there.” I didn’t like how my voice quivered, but I chose to ignore it. “I might never come out.”
He shrugged. “Then I’ll leave.”
Right… well, that was comforting.
I didn’t look back at him as I went down alone.
Chapter 30
The basin was exactlyas we'd left it.
That shouldn't have surprised me — we'd been gone only a few days, and how exactly could it have changed in such a short time? But still… I'd half expected it to have been different. To have closed up, gone dark, orsomething.
It hadn't. The rings in the snow pulsed slowly and patiently. The waterspouts rose and fell in their unpatterned way. The gemstone veins in the rock faces still caught the flat gray light and threw it back in pale, fractured color.
It hadn’t changed at all, but one thing was clear. As clear as I was standing there.
It was waiting.
I felt it the moment I stepped off the ridge. It wasn’t the urgent pull of the first time, not the desperate pressure of the weeks before that. It was quieter than either of those.
It was recognition.
My magic pulsed within me.
I navigated the waterspouts from memory, moving across the basin floor with the careful attention of someone who had mapped this terrain and trusted their body to remember it. Only one caught me, a small one that caught my left boot, soaking itthrough to the stocking before I stepped clear. The warmth it gave fled soon after contact.
I kept moving to the entrance.
The tunnel lay in the far rock face, dark and still. I stood at the threshold for a moment, not from fear, but from the trailfinder's instinct to pause at the edge of unknown territory and take stock of what I was walking into.
I knew what I was walking into, and it scared the shit out of me. Were the creatures we hadn’t seen still down there? I had no weapons.
I went in anyway.
The diamonds in the ceiling were exactly as I remembered.
All sizes, all colors, catching the light from the small moonstone in my hand and throwing it back, the whole ceiling alive with it in that slow, breathing way that Edran had noticed and not wanted to name.
I walked slowly this time. Not out of caution — I knew the way — but because I wanted to look. I'd been too occupied the first time, too busy managing the pull, and having Nicco beside me, seeing far too much.
This time, there was only me, and I let myself take it in.
They were beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with their worth. Not the kind of beauty that comes from rarity or expense. Rather, it was the beauty of something that existed long before anyone thought to put a price on it, and it would be here long after the last merchant decided what they should cost.
I thought about Thiece. Aboutthe ones that are unknown.
