AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The rest of the meal passed in silence.
{ Chapter 11 }
“Twelve steps if I remember correctly. Are you there?”
Rune reached downward with his right toe and his foot hit hard stone. He stretched the last step down off the ladder and the leather satchel strung across his shoulder swung and hit him in the lower back. He set the lantern he had dangling across his arm down onto the stone floor, half angled on a pile of dirt.
Cool clamminess blanketed his skin and he glanced about, the light from his lantern not lending much illumination to the chamber he’d just descended into.
He looked upward on the ladder. “I’m down. Your turn.”
Through the flickering shadows of the lantern hanging from her arm, Elle turned about and scampered down the wooden ladder riveted to the dusty stone wall. Fast, almost as though she was skipping steps on the way down.
His hands went up in the air about her waist, ready to catch her just in case, but she was solid in each step she took.
She jumped from the last step, landed and spun to him, a smile bright on her face. “This is it. I always loved coming down here. Lord Kallen has already done so much excavating on the upper chambers that there aren’t a lot of surprises. Except for when we found the entrance to this chamber in the floor. That was a surprise.”
She shifted the lantern swaying from her arm to her hand and the light reflected up onto her face. Her blue eyes were sparkling diamonds for the sheer excitement running through her.
“Everything down here is mostly untouched—hasn’t been seen for hundreds of years. It’s been more than half a year since I’ve been in this lower chamber. It’s dug deeper into the stone but still had a water source at some point. I always found it more interesting than the upper chambers, though Lord Kallen likes to spend most of his time excavating in the Gold, Silver and Emerald chambers above and I help him as directed, even if my eyes are always straying to the entrance of this chamber. Other than this small entrance downward, we’ve never found a stairway leading down into it, so it’s a mystery. But it was clearly in use at some time.”
She stepped around him and moved forward, her feet crunching through dirt and rubble as she lifted her lantern high in front of her and pointed with her free hand. “This area was the bath—you can see the indentation in the ground. So much has fallen from the ceiling and slid down into there. Tiles and dirt—or it’s quite possible the bath was filled in before they moved to creating the higher baths. Unless they did this one after the others. But tiles used to exist on the ceiling as well—one can tell for the amount of tesserae mixed in among the dirt.” Her finger flicked toward the pitted, dank ceiling, beads of water dripping occasionally from crevices. “Unfortunately, whatever that was up there has been lost to time. Come—follow me in. The mosaics with the box in it are on the far end of the chamber.”
Rune watched her movements in the shadows in front of him as she scrambled her way across the debris lining the edge of the bath. She was in a bubble of joy, digging around in the cavern of this room—talking about it. Bewitching, in more ways than he could count.
A sorceress.
That was what she had to be.
Why else had he told her at dinner the previous night what he had been thinking?
Talking about his youth. Telling her of his loss. There was only one other person that knew of his youth, what he had suffered, and that fact alone had already cost him too much in his life.
It’d been stupid to tell another soul. Stupid to ramble on to Elle.
But he hadn’t been able to curb his tongue until it was too late.
She was a sorceress—it was the only logical explanation.
It couldn’t be that he was actually forming a bond with her.
She’d vowed no attachments. An oath he’d echoed wholeheartedly at the moment he’d made it.
But then she had bloody well kissed his scar. And when he had driven into her, their bodies meeting in visceral rawness, he’d found himself drowning into a belonging like he’d never known. There’d been no way to stop it.
That his declaration to not form any attachment to her had lit to flame and was quickly burning to ash had not escaped him.
That had always been his problem. He formed bonds with people, and those bonds had always been detrimental, in one way or another. Elle would be no different and he needed to rein in his overzealous cock.
Elle looked over her shoulder at him. “What do you know of the Box of Draupnir? I know you know about the time that Des and Jules and then Weston and Laney possessed it. But before that? Jules said that your first captain on theFirefox—the privateering ship—had held onto the box for a number of years?”
“Yes. Captain Folback. And the box ruined him, full and through. The box delivered riches as promised.” He shook his head. “The ships we captured had bounty like you wouldn’t believe on board. It made all of us so wealthy after the first year there was no reason to continue on—all of us on that ship could have retired and never had another care in the world. But we persisted, more ships downed. More bounty. And it rotted our captain from the inside out. He was always a fair man, a good man, but he couldn’t stop. Not until his wife was killed by men that wanted to take the box for their own. He forfeited his own life to save her, even though she was already dead.”
Elle’s feet had stopped and she’d turned fully toward him, her jaw agape. “Jules never told me that.”
“It was gruesome—horrendous. After that Des took the box and hid it. And those of us that were there—we don’t talk about it. Not if we can help it.”
“But you just told me.”
