“Fuck.” Caleb’s eyes tracked the salt. “They really don’t want the fae getting out.”
A shiver skittered down my spine. No one would save us. If we died here, Kilian would not even be able to cross into Cosanus to retrieve our bodies.
“We should go back,” Caleb said, his voice wavering. “I have abadfeeling about this.”
I did too. A gut-gnawing, sinking feeling that nothing good was going to come of entering this cave.
The voices… I’d thought they were commanding me toward the cave. But they were warning me away. They went silent now, as if they had done their job and now waited for me to make my own decision.
I looked at my watch, chewing on my lip. “We still have time.”
“Gods above, of all the people I had to get paired with for this challenge, I had to get the one whowantsto go into the scary cave filled with ancient monsters,” Caleb complained.
“You don’t have to come,” I snapped.
“If you die in there, I’ll have to explain how it happened to your terrifying instructor, and then he’ll probably kill me anyway,” he grouched. “Let’s just get this over with.”
Caleb reached into his pocket and drew out a small globe. It glowed a bright silver. “Orblight,” he explained. “I nicked it from one of the sconces in Valhan House.”
I was reluctantly impressed. How clever for someone who’d insisted on the easiest solution for Septimus’ alphabet riddle.
I unsheathed the dagger Umma had gifted me so long ago. It brought me a small comfort. Rubbing my thumb across the ruby hilt, I thought of home. Home, which no longer felt like Serila, but like a girl with cornsilk hair and fierce loyalty, a soft boy who loved his brother, and a pair of silver eyes that haunted me.
I stepped across the boundary. Calendula’s wings fluttered, timed perfectly with my own racing heart. The light from the orb illuminated the rocks around us and the parched ground ahead, casting everything in an incandescent sheen. Goosebumps prickled my skin as new shadows were thrown into light, each step bringing us closer to the unknown. We followed the curve of the wall until the stones sliced open, revealing a cavernous space. What was set inside turned my saliva to sawdust.
In the glow of the orblight, a long banquet table swam into view. Food, which had long since rotted and turned to powder, littered the surface of the table. And among it, discolored in the light, was bone.
But the most horrifying thing in the room were not the tiny fragments of bone filling each plate, but the thirteen massive creatures that sat, unmoving, in chairs before them. Each one was as large and tall as Kilian, their faces withered and sunken. Veins protruded from their stretched skin, pale and grey. Leathery, paper-thin wings sprouted from their backs, shrunken and decrepit as they hung on the floor, centuries of sand and dust coating every inch of them.
The remaining fae. All that existed of the primordial creatures who had seen the beginning of our world.
They looked like statues, carved from ancient stone. Their eyes open and unseeing, glazed over from years of desiccation. They were not dead though. They were meant to be immortal. There was just no magic left for them to feed on. They had entered a stasis, just as Kilian had predicted.
I swallowed as I stepped forward, my eyes scanning the rest of the space for any sort of weapon. I wasn’t sure if Calendula was even breathing, face-to-face with her prehistoric ancestors.
“We need to search for the weapon,” I whispered, but the words sounded loud and harsh in the absolute stillness.
Caleb nodded, moving carefully around the table, giving the fae a wide berth. His sprite flitted from his shoulder, landing softly on the table. She picked her way daintily across the plates, searching. Calendula’s wings fluttered ahead of me.
“Don’t go too far,” I murmured.
The shadow sprite dipped inside a dusty vase in the middle of the table, her resounding sneeze echoing through the cavern.
I shot a wild look at the fae, but they remained motionless.
I probed through the ether for the voices that had warned me away so desperately, but nothing reached back. Dropping to my knees, I dipped my head beneath the table, but only dry sand and faded bone was visible. Caleb’s shadow was moving around, taking the orblight as he went. The light flickered and danced, and the shadows inside of me thrummed.
I moved away from the table, convinced there was no weapon hidden beneath and instead focused on the fae seatedaround it. The one closest to me looked female. Her thin hair had separated in clumps on her skull, leaving bald patches behind, but I could tell she had once been beautiful. She had a heart-shaped face and large, glazed-over eyes, her full lips parted as if she were about to speak. She wore a rose-colored gown, with a low neckline that hung limply off her too-thin body. The grey veins snaking along her forearms made her look dehydrated and malnourished.
I examined the male beside her. He was broad-shouldered and twice as big. A cut ran across his left eye to his chin. Several onyx rings gleamed on his fingers.
The fae opposite him was tall and lean. He stared ahead sagely; his jaw was relaxed but his posture rigid. How a soldier might hold himself. He looked calm, in the way one might when they’ve accepted death. I scrutinized his face. I had the strangest feeling I’d seen him before, but as soon as I tried chasing the thought, it vanished.
He wore a sleeveless chain-link tunic above an open necked shirt, exposing the hard column of his throat. A delicate silver chain wound around his neck, its pendant resting against his breastbone. Shaped like a dagger, it was large and looked heavy, and at its hilt…
It couldn’t be.
I held out the dagger Umma had given me, placing it near the one on the fae’s chest, comparing them side-by-side. His tunic concealed most of his dagger, but its hilt peeked through the mesh, the stone in the center a polished ruby that, after all these years, had not dulled in shine.
