Page 70 of The Incendiary

When they were gone, I checked all directions and climbed down. I slipped on the last bit but was close to the ground, agile, and prepared enough to land on my feet. I bent my knees to soften the blow, but the pain was still sharp.

A few of the trees nearby had holes in their bases. I darted between them, digging around for clues. The fourth tree had a hollow trunk, with a small opening almost hidden by branches and dirt. I slowly reached in, ensuring nothing lived inside, then sifted through the debris and found a single glass jar in the far corner. It was too clean to have been there very long, with three tiny scrolls inside, individually wrapped. Scrolled in dark ink on the jar’s lid was one sentence:

Since I know you’re curious about things that come in threes.

“Gross.” I quickly and quietly unsealed the jar, then unrolled the scrolls to find a single line written on each, together forming… a poem? A riddle? I rearranged them until the progression made sense.

“Shera?” I asked.

“Are you hurt?” she immediately replied.

I let out a sad laugh. She was almost as overprotective as Gavin was. “There’s a riddle inside this jar. Are umbras good at riddles?”

“Umbras are good at everything.”

She seemed so sure of herself that I read it to her twice:

I sparkle with vows, but I’m hidden from sight, Hiding in depths where day meets night, In twilight’s embrace, the world around me dances with light.

“How lovely,” she drawled sarcastically after the second read-through. “A commander, a thief, and a poet.”

Something twisted in my chest when I read the word vows, because I couldn’t remember the ones I’d made four hundred years ago. I sniffed and shoved away the ache in my chest.

“The first line is obviously the rings,” I told Shera. “The second… where day meets night.” A sunset, perhaps. Or where light meets dark. “A sh⁠—”

“Shadow,” she said at the same time.

“Nice.”

“Takes one to know one,” she told me. The largest nearby shadow was made by a massive oak tree reaching over the ravine. I approached the edge and glanced down into the water, halfway up the rock. But shadows moved with the sun. Unless he knew exactly when I would arrive here, the edge of that shadow as a guide could only be so accurate.

“Moonlight in the water,” I told Shera. “The third line is water. It dances with moonlight at night. The rings must be in this ravine.”

At least I knew how to swim. My eyes pricked, and I smiled. He’d made sure of that, too, in hot springs west of Brinnea.

“There are flesh‑eating fish in that ravine. Lots of them. They attack in groups.”

But the water looked clear, not a single fin in sight. “I don’t see any fish.”

“They hide in the rocks during the day and come out at night unless otherwise disturbed.”

Well, shit. My first thought was to use Soltum’s power to command the fish away, but I had no idea if I could communicate with more than one creature at once.

“I guess I’ll have to be fast. It’s at least a twenty‑foot drop into the water.”

“If you dive straight in, it’ll hurt less,” Shera rushed out. “Palms flat together like you’re making an arrow. Lead with your hands and keep your body straight. Your body probably remembers how to do it.”

“How do you know how to dive like a human, Shera?”

“I know lots of things, Ary,” she answered sassily. “I’m⁠—”

“—an umbra, I know.” I chuckled out loud, prepping my body to dive as instructed. My mind reeled with the number of things that could go wrong. The rings could simply not be down there. The fish could wake and devour me to the bone. Would my body even be capable of healing itself after that? I could hit the surface of the water wrong and get knocked out on impact, or worse. Shera said she wouldn’t let me drown, but could she scale up twenty feet of rock on her own while dragging my sopping wet body behind her?

Breathe, I heard him say.

That deep, soothing voice sent warmth through my veins. He was somehow always here when I needed him. With his voice in my mind, I pushed off rock with my heel and dove in.

The freefall and the plunge knocked my held breath from my lungs. Once submerged, I circled blindly before finding my equilibrium and rising to the surface to breathe. The water was cold. Not enough to be dangerous, but damn, it was miserable.