Page 113 of Crown of the Dunes

Keera shuddered. We took a few more steps in silence, before Keera froze, holding her fist up to signal me to stop too. I did, holding the torch up to illuminate what it was she saw. I could see no change in the tunnel, but a quiet scraping, like the swish of sand sliding down a dune began, growing louder.

“Erix,” Keera said, her voice laced with fear, looking down. I followed her gaze, and horror flooded my veins as I saw her boots sinking into the sand. I took a step toward her, but she threw out her hands.

“No!” she cried, but it was too late.

The ground where she stood collapsed, and her scream pierced both the air and my heart as she plummeted into blackness. Her terrified shriek cut off with a thud. All I could think of was Keera alone in the darkness, and I took a running leap down into the hole that had swallowed her.

Chapter twenty-nine

Keera

Idragged in breaths through my lips with shuddering gasps. Panic fought against me as I tried to regain the air that had been knocked out of me with my unexpected fall, but darkness pressed in on me from all sides, adrenaline pumping in my veins.

My magic shivered, but didn’t burst out in full panic, as if it recognized that it was still surrounded by the desert instead of encased in a mountain.

A thud sounded next to me and a soft familiar grunt. From the scraping sound, I guessed that Erix had broken his fall with a roll, where as I had plummeted to the ground gracelessly.

“Keera,” his voice was raw and panicked as I heard shuffling.

I tried to respond, but with my lungs still heaving in shock, I only managed a quiet groan. A hand patted my leg frantically, as if Erix had been casting around for me in the darkness. He followed it up to my chest and then my face.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

I took stock, and found that miraculously, I seemed to be intact. Apart from having the wind knocked from me and the strange shakiness that gripped my limbs after a sudden fall, nothing seemed amiss.

“I’m fine,” I gasped. “It’s just… very dark.”

It was a silly thing to say, but it was not untrue. I had never minded night in the desert. In fact, I had generally enjoyed the peacefulness of the cooler air and the sounds of sleepy animals—looked forward to looking up at the velvety sky filled with too many stars to count.

This was nothing like that. The blackness was oppressive, as if a wet blanket had been laid over all my senses. Erix grunted, and his hands disappeared from my face, stealing away the only sensation I had to ground myself in the endless miasma.

I squinted as fire flared to life. Erix held it in his palm, and it lit his features eerily, casting long shadows that accentuated his proud nose and angular jaw.

“I can’t hold it for long,” he said, gritting his teeth.

I felt the tumult of power pouring down the bond in my gut—he had the power to sustain the flame but struggled with the control of containing it in his hand.

Quickly, I sat up and cast around, trying to get a sense of where we were. The tunnel we sat in seemed similar to the one above, but this one forked off in many directions, making it seem like we sat at the middle of a labyrinthian maze.

My stomach leaped into my throat, threatening to spill its contents when I spotted misshapen piles in small alcoves and recognized the bleached white of bones. Erix clearly spotted them too and grimaced.

“Quick, grab me a long, thick bone,” he said.

Scrabbling to my hands and knees, I crawled toward one of the piles. I tried to focus on his request and not the mangled mixture of skeletons I sorted through. The clacking and scraping seemed inordinately loud in the oppressive quiet as I tried—and failed—not to recognize the skull of a fox and a human spine far too small to belong to a full-grown adult. Finally, I grasped what must have been a horse’s femur. Pulling it free of the tangled mess, I hurried back to where Erix waited.

Guessing what he intended, I ripped a piece of cloth from the loose end of my hood and wrapped it around the bulbous end of the bone. Then, he took it from me and dipped it into the flame dancing in his palm, which threatened to spill over. After a long, tense moment, the make-shift torch lit.

Erix grunted and the fire in his hand guttered out, leaving us with just the bone torch.

“Their tunnel network is more complex than we thought,” I said, looking around us.

He held up the torch to illuminate the channel we sat in stretching beyond the circle of light in both directions, and at least three branches leading away into the darkness.

“I thought the den was small enough that we wouldn’t have difficulty coming across a tricrith. Now, I’m not so sure. They might not even be nearby.” His voice was rough with anger.

I reached out to lay a hand on his arm in reassurance, but he pulled away. A hollow feeling formed in my throat, and I let it drop into my lap. He had been distant ever since I accepted Viltov’s alliance, and the engagement to Calix. But when he had pinned me to my bed and thoroughly marked me as his, I had found hope that all was not lost between us. Perhaps my marriage could hold an alliance for Kelvadan, while my heart and body belonged to another. After all, Calix himself had said that the marriage was a political one, despite his promises that he would try to make me happy.

A more insidious hope burrowed in my chest as well—that we had been wrong, and getting the Heart might mean I wouldn’t need to marry Calix. I did my best to squash those feelings though. I knew it was too late, but dread and uncertainty gnawed at me all the same.