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Chapter Thirty
Tiernan
There.It was her. Between two pillars of jagged, decaying stone. I watched as she walked, her chin up in defiance even though she was manacled and beingdraggeddown the corridor. They were moving her somewhere. Now was their chance.
“There,” I pointed from our cover under a dense needled tree. “I saw her pass just through there.”
As one, the other three looked up. Finn gasped as another male emerged between the two pillars, prodding a female who could only be Aisling. I watched the young healer cross the opening, her skin glowing in the light of the setting sun. Her head in her hands.
They had been right. She had been taken by the Mad King, too. If they did everything right, they would save two lives this day.
Thank you, Arrow,I thought to myself, looking to where the falcon sat perched high in the branches above us. Without him, we may not have made it in time. He nodded to me as though he understood.
“You’re certain it was Liana?” Alaric asked, his eyes hard.
“Yes.”
“Then there’s no time to lose. There’s only one reason they’d take her from the bindstone cells.”
He didn’t need to finish the thought. If they were willing to risk her being able to use her Grace against them, it could only be so the king could kill her himself without having his own abilities marred by the stone in the cells.
But why didn’t she fight? She could have already killed them. There were only three males. With her power, she could take on a hundred.
“… but the archers,” Finn was saying as I turned from the ruined palace.
Alaric nodded gravely, “I saw.”
There were five archers spaced evenly on still standing turrets of stone. I had counted them, too.
“Let me take them out,” Kade implored.
Alaric shook his head, “We need to be stealthy. We don’t know how many more they have within the palace’s walls.”
“We fly then,” Kade said, stretching his wings.
Finn pointed up at the sky where a Draconian circled the mountainside. One of two I’d seen. “And even if they weren’t there, the sun hasn’t set. We’d be pin-cushions for the archers.”
“Thenwhat? We can’t just walk up the main steps.”
No, we couldn’t. But maybe we could make our own.
Alaric shook his head at the mountain, his teeth clenched in a grimace. “We’re wasting time.”
“I have an idea,” I offered, and looked around my boots, readying for the task to come. I studied the slope of rock. It was perhaps two hundred yards to the base of the palace, and there was one spot—path that would be concealed from eyes in the skyorthe palace itself, hidden in shadow.
All they needed were the steps.
“What are you thinking?” Alaric asked—near pleaded.
I gave the captain a look that left no space for rebuttal. We needed to get up there, and this was the best—theonlyviable option. Even if it drained me beyond anything I’d ever managed to do before. “We climb.”
I let the Grace awaken in my core. Felt the earth stir at my feet. The root shot out from the earth. I bent it to my will, forcing it to defy gravity and crawl up the side of the mountain. Molding it to the rock face. Thick and sturdy.
Chapter Thirty-One
Liana
We entered the throne room. Or what had once been the throne room. Now it was a ruin. More a courtyard than anything else with its missing roof and a floor of tile overgrown with moss and weeds.
