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Perhaps there was a priest underground, one Frol had been somehow keeping alive. For all I knew, he was feeding Edan himself. I sat beside Frol as he prayed and thought.

I prayed a bit myself, but if the Goddess was listening, I got no reply. I tried to feel Rada’s other mates through our bond, knowing that having Lusca or Skadi here to lend some supernatural strength would be handy. But all I could feel were hints of the terrifying heat that had wracked her with pain.

Once I’d rested, I got up, gathered vines from the nearby jungle, and began to make rope. For some reason, Frol took one look at the rope and laughed. “No, Alpha. No rope.” He went and harvested what looked like the rest of the vines in the jungle, then carried them to me and dropped them between us. He sat and began weaving expertly, far faster than I had. “No rope,” he said, showing me what he was making instead. “Rope fall. Rope weak.”

“A ladder?” I asked, noting the clever knots that reinforced the places where the rungs met the longer braided vines. They were a knot I’d learned as a child. “Warrior’s knots!”

“Yes,” he said with a snort. “Make ladder warriors.”

Ignoring the feeling that he was mocking me, I worked on the ladder with him for the next few days.

Each morning, Frol and I took a break from weaving and traveled to the tunnel, lowering jugs of water and baskets of food. When I called down, no one ever replied. I never heard the rocks moving again, but Frol insisted we keep sending the baskets.

“For all we know, we’re just gathering food and chucking it into lava,” I muttered as the sun reached its peak. It had been ten days since I’d left Pict with Rada, seven days since she’d murmured her command.

I fastened the right-side loop at the top of the finished ladder to the pommel of my sheathed sword, and the left side to the covered blade, then began to feed the ladder down the tube. It took a long while, as the opening was too narrow to just drop the whole thing in, and got stuck more than once. I had to use a long bamboo pole to jiggle it around until it slid down.

“I’ll make it fit,” I murmured, half-wishing Rada was here to laugh about that. But her monster mates were taking care of her. I could feel her in our bond, sometimes. Swirls of lust and heat, and a lessening of the distant pain.

Frol stood by as I tested the sword one more time, making sure it would hold. The tube wasn’t much wider than my shoulders.

Once I reached the bottom, I would look for Alexios, or whoever Frol was feeding, and then return to the surface via the ladder. I just hoped my weight on the damned thing wouldn’t cause the edges of the hole to break and send me plummeting to my death.

Well, not necessarily death. Lusca had told Lachlan as they swam away from Pict that the bond he and Skadi shared had made him even more powerful, and that power was shared with Rada and trickled to all her mates. I’d noticed that small cuts and scrapes healed faster than usual, though I wasn’t certain if the bond would trickle fast enough to heal a broken neck.

“Frol watch,” my quiet companion said with a smile. “Warrior knot ladder.”

“Thanks, Frol.” I began to climb down.

The journey was long and, though I’d never been claustrophobic, by the time the tunnel opened up into a larger space, I had promised myself a hundred times I’d never go underground again. The ladder ran out about ten feet from the cavern floor, visible by the faint orange glow that seeped from one side of the darkness. I took off my shirt, tied it to the last rung, and lowered myself down the rest of the way.

The empty space around me seemed to grow as I stared into it. I’d never been anywhere this dark before, at least not without a torch. But I was glad not to see flames here, in what had been Edan’s resting place.

I walked a few feet around, where the distant sunlight from the tunnel reached the glittering black rock. Smooth rock, mostly, with not much ash and nothing to see except for a stack of baskets.

Empty baskets, except for the one Frol had sent down before me. I picked one up, and felt around inside. Whoever was down here had eaten all of it.

“Goran.”

I had a knife in my hand before the final consonant of my name sounded. I faced the direction it came from. “Who is it?” He didn’t answer, but I heard something slithering on the floor. “Edan.”

“No,” he hissed, just as he moved into the faint light. “It’s me. Serak.”

I clenched my jaw as he crawled into view. He wasn’t fully human anymore. His back legs were scaled, his feet ending in talons like his hands. His skin glittered with obsidian scales and his eyes, when he raised his head, were slitted like a dragon’s.

I didn’t believe that he wasn’t Edan. “You look like shit.”

“I feel worse than I look,” he said with what might have been a laugh, but ended in a cough.

“You sound like shit, too. Would you like some water?”

He surprised me by refusing. “I don’t need to eat or drink.”

“Then who’s been eating Frol’s offerings?”

His brow creased, as if my question had hurt him. “The priest.”

ALEXIOS