AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Oh, yes,” he replies. “We’re going up.”
I open my mouth to say I can’t, that I’ve never climbed anything before, not since I was taken to Grathgore’s palace and trained to use my magic for the glory of the Kingdom of the Summer, but Phaedron’s hand closes around my wrist like a vice, and I don’t think anything under the stars is going to stop him.
It makes, some part of my mind is forced to admit, a strange kind of sense. Of course Malron will assume I made a break for the horses. That’s where my illusions were going, and besides, where else would I run? If I tried to go up the canyon, I’d run right into the magic breaking the anomaly. And up? What kind of an idiot would try to climb up the canyon walls?
The kind of an idiot who came through a portal into my bedroom, apparently. Phaedron lets go of my wrist.
“Follow me,” Phaedron says, in a whisper that’s as rough as the walls of the canyon. “See that crack up there? It should be big enough to hide both of us.”
I stare at the thin band of sunlight bathing the crack in the canyon’s stone face. It seems very far away.
“Oh, and be quiet,” Phaedron adds.
I scowl at him, trying to convey that, yes, I do understand the need for stealth when we’re trying to outwit King Grathgore’s magicians and half of his army. Phaedron gives me that strange almost-smile again, then presses his foot into a crack in the stone and leaps up.
I take a deep breath and try to do what Phaedron just did. The rock beneath my hands is cold as I pull myself up the cliff’s face, and it hums with an unpleasant sort of magical energy, as if being this close to the anomaly for this long has imbued the silent stone with some of the terrible magic Rensivar used to build the barrier.
That’s not exactly a comforting thought. My gut crawls like it’s trying to climb up my spine and escape.
“Alindra,” someone whispers.
My eyes crack open. Phaedron is braced against the rocks above me, and he’s smiling at me through the place where his right arm should be. There’s something disconcerting about his attractiveness now, something that makes my gut pull tight in warning. It’s not an illusion, those high cheekbones and full lips, and somehow that makes everything worse.
He’s got a face that can hide a thousand lies, as my sister would say. She’d been talking about Balmyr, of course, but a shiver runs up the back of my neck all the same. You can’t trust a face like that.
“What?” I snap, as quietly as I can manage.
“Don’t look down,” Phaedron whispers.
And then, stars save me, he winks at me.
Chapter7
Phaedron
ONLY FOOLS TRUST MAGICIANS
“The little bitch couldn’t have gone far. Check the horses!”
That snarling voice echoes through the tiny, secret crack in the canyon wall where Alindra and I are currently clinging to cold stone and trying not to breathe. It’s the man in black, of course. He seems to be the only one of King Grathgore’s magicians with the nerve to speak. His barked command is followed by whispers of agreement, then rustling as I assume everyone rushes off to do his bidding.
I inhale very slowly. My chest and back both hit stone as my lungs expand. There was a sound when it happened, a soft huffing noise, like the exhausted sigh of some massive, wounded beast. I didn’t think I’d be able to tell when they slammed the door to my home shut. Honestly, I didn’t want to know. It would have been better to leave a little whisper of hope, the fantasy that I could just stumble back into the Lands Below.
The heat of Alindra’s body presses through my clothes and into the scar that runs up my right side like a fissure in river ice, and I grit my teeth. That sensation isn’t pain, exactly, for all that it runs through my body like flames curling up an old log. Not pain, and not pleasure, but something that dances across the thin line between the two.
No one has touched that scar. Charay wrapped the wound in bandages and rubbed it with healing salves during the hazy, miserable early days of my recovery, but no one has even seen those scars since the final bandages came off one cold morning when I’d made damn sure Rowan and Arryn were gone. Hells, I can’t even bring myself to touch that side of my body, aside from running a cursory washcloth over the angry red bands and white, twisted ridges. The visceral evidence of my failure as the guard of the World’s End.
Alindra’s body shifts, pressing shoulders and hips against the bands of scar tissue that streak up my abdomen, and it’s all I can do to keep from making a sound. Because there’s no way to escape it, this heat, this searing physical contact. When the magicians slammed the magical hole between our worlds shut, we still weren’t close enough to the rim of the canyon’s wall to go over. So I dragged Alindra into this crack in the cliff’s face and prayed to whatever stars might be listening that it would be big enough to hide both of us.
And it is. Barely. We’re hidden, at least, with my sword wedged into the crack in the mountain, although if I try to squeeze any deeper into this crevasse in the stone my skull is going to pop like a grape. I close my eyes and try to think, to come up with some sort of a plan, but my mind is still a chaotic, trembling mess. Memories jump and flutter in the semidarkness. Polished black boots and a smile, a laugh. Promises that it won’t be so bad next time, now will it?
But it was always bad. If anything, it got worse and worse, that sensation of losing my magic. Having it ripped out of my body as if the marrow was being pulled from inside of my bones. My mother’s face drifts through the tangle of fear and pain rippling inside my skull, that tight way she’d held her lips. That haunted look in her eyes.
I’d thought she might lose that look once we escaped through the dragon’s portal. It was a childish thought, but then again, I was a child when we’d joined the throng of refugees being forced up the Dragon Pass and into the mountain. I’d been terrified someone would recognize us, would stop us and send us back. Only years later did I realize we must have looked just as shocked and scared as everyone around us. We were just fleeing a different kind of monster.
I take a deep breath, sucking in the tang and grit of the granite pressed against my lips, and try to drag myself back to the present. No one in the Lands Below talks about the day the dragon Rensivar the Wicked trapped us all beneath the mountain. And that vast silence made it easier for me to create my own story, a pretty little web of illusions about what had led us under the mountain, what we’d been running from, and what we’d been like before. Of all the illusions I’ve cast, the mother and father I described for Rowan when we were children were still my favorites.
Not that any of that matters now. I press my jaw together to keep from hissing. Exhaustion throbs inside me like a festering wound. Voids below, when was the last time I’d slept?
