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“It is I who should be thanking you—both of you. My court owes you a debt we can never repay.”
I tried to summon up some brain power, in order to respond appropriately, but most of the available blood was being bogarted by my stomach. “That’s, uh, I mean, you don’t have to—”
“That is kind of you,” Louis-Cesare said smoothly, rescuing me. “Anything that strengthens our alliance is of mutual benefit, not only to us, but to the war effort.”
Hassani smiled at him politely for a moment, and then his eyes slid back to me. “But perhaps I can make at least a small down payment.”
“A down payment?” I echoed, confused.
“Yes, indeed.” He leaned closer, almost enough to whisper in my ear. “I think I know what the fey want with your sister.”
Chapter Seventeen
Dorina, Faerie
As it turns out, fey shields do have limits, if very, very high ones. Half an hour later, Ray and I finally managed to fight our way out of the waterlogged sphere, which had become trapped behind some large rocks at the bottom of the waterfall, and drag ourselves onto solid land again. That left us inside a cavern behind the falls, but I did not feel like complaining.
Judging by the way Raymond collapsed face down on the wet sand and just stayed there, neither did he.
I wasn’t sure if his position was because vampires do not have to breathe, or because he simply did not want to see any more of Faerie. In spite of everything, I found this place to be fascinating. He did not appear to agree.
For a while, we simply lay there, him face down and me face up, enjoying the view.
And, as I was beginning to expect from Faerie, it was spectacular.
Right above me, imbedded into the ceiling of the cave, was some kind of ancient fossil. I couldn’t name it, as I couldn’t name anything here, and I only had bones to go on in any case. But it looked like a winged dinosaur.
Not a dragon, although it had a similar body, albeit far smaller and slimmer. But the head was wrong, being too streamlined, and the tail was different. But it was the wings where the real difference lay, because they were feathered. I knew this, not because any feathers had survived who knew how many centuries, but because their outlines had been filled in . . .
With opal.
At least, it looked like opal. I could not be certain, as this was an alien world. But when I rolled my head slightly, back and forth, the bright blue and green colors shifted in a familiar way, sparkling down at me from the surrounding dull brown rocks like a piece of stained glass.
The feathers must have lasted a long time, giving the stone time to work its magic. It had ignored the bones—a dull, yellowish skull, a cage of ribs, a tail mostly sunk in rock—but had spilled delicate colors down each plume. The picture was so complete that I could see the individual barbs, the tiny feathers within a feather that grew out of the shaft.
They splayed out exuberantly, with one wing mostly hidden by the creature’s body, but the other looking like it was still in flight. I stared up at it for a long time. I did not understand why it was so bright, but perhaps it was the angle of the sun, spearing through gaps in the falls crashing to my right.
The sunlight didn’t penetrate very far. The waterfall was large, and the volume of liquid spilling over the top of it astonishing. It created a thick, white curtain, which contrasted nicely with the black soil inside the cave and the greenish hue of the pool of water beneath the falls. Every so often, I would se
e a brief flash of sky or of the rocky slopes of the riverbank outside, but for the most part, the view was opaque.
But some light did make it in, and reminded me of the ley lines, being striations of color that bled onto everything else. It striped the rocks inside the cave, the damp sand, and a few crystalline structures in the stone. It was really quite lovely, if less spectacular than the formation above.
But then, that seemed to be true of all of Faerie.
It was lovely. . . right up until it tried to kill you.
I slowly got back to my feet.
Raymond lay where he was, and for now, I thought that was best. I needed to check the cave, to make sure that nothing dangerous lay within, while he needed to rest. People often thought that vampires were like wind-up toys: give them enough blood and they just kept going and going. But it wasn’t true. They had more stamina than humans, but they could get tired, too, and he had been through a good deal.
I left him where he was and set off to explore.
The cave was surprisingly big, with quite a few stalagmite and stalactite formations spearing up from the floor and down from the ceiling as I left the relatively open, sandy area near the falls. It was mostly composed of the same brownish stone I’d seen near the mouth, except for the formations, which were a mottled brownish/gray. The sand underfoot was mostly brown as well, except for the black soil near the entrance. I supposed that it must have been carried downstream by the water and deposited there. It looked to come from a different region.
There was enough light to illuminate more of the beautiful fossils that studded the cave here and there. I saw a flash of color underfoot and pushed away some sand to find myself looking at the remains of a beaver-like animal. It had a broad, flat tail that had been filled in with a sheet of bright yellow opal in one stunning, unbroken piece. Like with the feathered creature, the body only had a few spots of color among the bones, but the tail was magnificent.
Even better was a clutch of eggs I discovered in a corner. I did not know if they came from a lizard or a bird, but they were three times as large as a chicken’s. Protected inside the cave, the shells had survived, but had cracked at some point through the millennia. And inside had formed perfectly egg-shaped opals, one the same blue-green as the creature near the entrance, one a deep, rich red, and one solid black with flecks of seemingly every color in the rainbow.
