Page 6 of A Thief Among Fae

“I’m scared, Cyn,” she whispers like the draugr can hear her. Maybe they can.

“You don’t need to be. We’ll be fine.” I squeeze her hand. She shudders as I lead her to the slab.

The air grows cold as I shimmy through the narrow gap, entering the forecourt. A musty stench smothers the resinous autumn air. As I riffle through my pack, Evie follows me inside. She watches me strike steel to flint to light my tinder. I light a small candle and place it inside my lantern.

“Couldn’t you have done that before we came in?” she asks. “What if there are draugr in here?”

“There’s none in this chamber.” The forecourt is plain, just a crumbled stone table in its center with rusted scissors strewn atop it. “This is where bodies were disemboweled and embalmed.”

“Gross.”

The ground slopes into a pool of murky water, its surface as still as glass.

I hand Evie a strip of cloth with mint leaves hand-sewn along the inside. “You’ll need this.” I wrap a matching one around my neck and pull it up to cover my mouth and nose. “There might not be air pockets down there. How long can you hold the water back for?”

Evie hesitates. “Twenty minutes? I haven’t done something like this since the sawmill flooded.”

I’m lucky that my mask hides my grimace. Twenty minutes is less than I hoped for. And if she fails. . . Our bodies won’t be discovered for months. Maybe never. “I’m ready,” I tell her. “You can do this.”

“Right.” Evie ties the cloth around her head, pulls it over her nose, then stills. “What’s this for, anyway?”

“Hope you don’t find out,” I answer with a teasing lilt.

She rolls her eyes, then breathes deeply. Strain pinches her face as the water ripples. Two waves erupt from the pool’s center, forcing the water to the sides of the chamber. Her hands tremble as a tunnel forms, revealing stone steps that descend deep into the barrow.

We hurry down. Evie forces the water ahead of us into the forecourt behind, the roar of rushing water surrounding us.

Neither of us speaks as we enter the main chamber, a large room that curves into a stone dome above us. A foul reek of rancid cheese hits us as Evie’s Gift exposes everything to the air. I retch and force myself to swallow back bile. The mint cloth helps, but not enough.

Evie bends over and gags. The water she’s holding back undulates as her focus wanes. I grab her arms. “Breathe with your mouth, not your nose! Focus, Evie!”

Her eyes water. But she nods. The ripples still.

Alcoves line the walls, many full of naked corpses coated in a grayish substance that shines like candle wax. I expected bones or that the commoners’ bodies would’ve decayed into nothing. Yet the strange wax coats them from head to toe, smoothing over their eye sockets and open mouths. Their ghoulish faces are straight from nightmares.

Evie blanches. “Are those draugr?”

“No, these are something else.” I run my hand over the stomach of one of the corpses, then push down on it. The brittle wax cracks, revealing a hollow rib cavity. “The water must’ve preserved the bodies.”

I set to work, pulling rings and necklaces off the corpses. The foul-smelling wax rubs off on the hem of my tunic. I smash urns, then check the shards for ancient currency. My pack grows heavier, but this isn’t even enough to feed us through the winter if our autumn crops fail. An early frost is all it takes to leave cellar shelves empty. We’ve come close to that too many times. If I didn’t sneak money made from tomb raiding into our meager savings. . . I don’t want to think about it now.

“We need to go down there, where the aristocracy is buried.” I point at the steps leading into another chamber, my chest tightening with anticipation.

“And we’ll leave after that?” Evie begs.

“We’ll go after the next chamber,” I vow.

We descend further into the darkness until the stairs split into two paths. There could be draugr down either.

I choose the left tunnel, and we continue until a faint yellow glow ripples ahead of us. “What is it?” Evie asks.

A warm tingle spreads from my toes to my fingers. There’s a buzzing in my ears, probably from the pressure this far below ground. If I don’t concentrate too hard on it, it sounds like the melodic clink of hundreds of chimes in the wind. “I don’t know.”

The chamber widens, and suddenly we’re no longer surrounded by water. We turn in confusion, looking at the tunnel where Evie’s air pocket shrinks into a burst of bubbles. The tunnel floods with water, but it doesn’t rush at us, as if another force is holding it back.

“That’s not you, right?” I ask Evie, just to be certain. She shakes her head and then takes in the scene before us with a gasp. Surrounding us are twisting towers of rubble. Blankets of luminescent flowers illuminate them, and there’s no end to the cavern in sight. Old magic thrums through me, warming my chest and tickling down my skin.

“It’s beautiful,” she says reverently. “You didn’t tell me that barrows look like this.”