“There. Stay away. You have twenty breaths before I lock the door.” And he stepped inside, slamming the door behind him.
“You cannot go in. Whatever you have in your blood could collapse the underworld,” Lia said. “You must stay here if you wish for your daughter to live.”
Edan’s entire body trembled, and it took all her control not to console him. Now was not the time. “How will they know it’s my daughter? I need to go.”
Ailith stepped closer and took his hand, holding a piece of linen she had in the folds of her tunic against his bleeding wound. “What was she wearing? What color is her hair? What is her favorite toy?”
Dyna whispered, “You cannot go, Edan. You have to trust Ailith.”
He nodded, accepting his fate. “Red curls just to her ears. She wore a blue nightgown with flowers her mother embroidered around the neck. Her favorite toy is a horse I carved for her. Its name is Horsy.”
Ailith held his gaze a moment longer than she needed to, committing every detail to memory as if carving it there. “I’ll find her. I promise you I’ll look for her first. What about Milo?”
“Brown hair, short. Brown trews and a light tunic. He carries a piece of our brown plaid with him.”
The ground gave a cracking sound, and Dyna yanked him back. “You cannot get any closer, Edan.”
Lia turned back to John and Ailith. “Go in and see what you can find out. If you don’t save them this time, we’ll use what you learned to find another way. Learn everything you can about the underworld. Do not put yourselves at risk. I cannot go inside, and neither can Erena.”
Ailith blew a kiss to her mother and father, then took one step inside the door, and the world changed.
She stopped breathing.
The staircase in front of her descended so far into the dark that she could not see the bottom, only a faint smear of dim light somewhere far below, the kind of light that gave no warmth and illuminated nothing. She reached back for her brother’s hand, gripping it without looking, her fingers finding his out of pure need.
There was a railing on one side, cold and slick beneath her palm, and she clung to it because the staircase tilted at an angle no human hand had made. The stone steps were not uniform, some were wide, some narrow, some dropped farther than expected. The air tasted of earth and something older and musty. Her belly roiled in response, but she did her best to ignore it.
“John, where are we going?” Her voice came back strange, flattened, as though the dark absorbed it.
Gruin’s laughter echoed in the new land, rolling up from the deep below them like something alive. “Welcome to the Dark Hollow. Enjoy your stay!”
“We’re not staying,” John bellowed. “Lead us to the bairns, and we’ll get them and leave.”
Gruin’s laughter continued, twisting as it rose, until it no longer sounded like laughter at all. “Two days until the threads start to thin!”
John squeezed her hand. “I’m going ahead of you.” They switched places, and he reached back to hold her hand, his sapphire sword casting a hard blue light that threw sharp shadows against the walls. The stone on either side was wet and dark-veined, strange markings cut into it at irregular intervals, not writing she recognized or symbols she had ever seen, and she made a point of not looking at them too long.
When they finally reached the bottom, the staircase ended without warning, giving way to flat ground with nowhere to go but right. A path opened before them through a forest of trees she had no name for. Their bark was the color of a bruise, deep purple and silvery-dark, and their branches hung toward the ground like willows, except these branches moved when nothing moved them, trailing slowly and deliberately as fingers searching for something to touch.
“I don’t want those branches touching me.” She kept close to John’s back.
“I’ll keep us clear. There’s light ahead.”
“How far does this go?”
“It’s endless, Ailith. We will not go that far.”
The trees swayed in a rhythm with no wind to stir them, and the sound was something like the croaking of frogs, but lower and longer, layered beneath a dry crackling that came and went.It was the sound of something frozen just beginning to crack apart.
“Is that sound breaking branches or flames in hearths? What is it, John?”
He shook his head and kept moving.
They reached the clearing and stopped together.
On either side of the path stood clear, faintly luminous blocks, taller than a man, arranged in rows stretching back into the dimness. Not ice, because there was no cold rising from them, no melt, no drip. Whatever held the figures inside was something else entirely. To the left, warriors. Men in armor, poised for battle, swords half-raised, mouths open in silent cries, eyes seeing nothing. To the right, the bairns.
Rows and rows of them in silver-walled blocks, each child suspended in stillness, eyes open and fixed on the warriors opposite. None of them moved. None of them blinked. But they were breathing. She could see the faint rise and fall of small chests, and that single fact was the only thing that stopped her from shattering entirely.
