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“Hey,” a man’s voice barks. “Who goes there?”
The world falls apart until it’s nothing but a jumble of images. Phaedron beside me, reaching for the sword between his shoulder blades. Torches fighting the darkness. Dead grass whispering at my feet, dried blades reaching upward, stretched toward a light that never came. And before us, two humans, men, their swords pale streaks of light in the gloom.
Magic explodes all around me, pushing outward like a thunderclap. Light screams through the hallway. The air swirls with blades of grass, and there’s a sound, a soft sort of huff; it takes me a moment to realize it came from Phaedron. And he’s smiling.
“Nice work,” he whispers.
I’m not sure what he’s talking about until I turn and see two bodies sprawled on the stone floor, the dim torchlight casting flickering shadows across their fallen blades.
Oh, stars. Oh, what have I done? What have I let the magic do?
Phaedron bends down before one of them. There’s the clink of metal against metal, and Phaedron gives me a grim sort of smile. He’s holding a metal ring bristling with keys.
“I’m going to guess,” Phaedron whispers, “that we’re about to find a door you can’t open.”
I nod vaguely. Magic twists in my gut, tugging me forward. Phaedron frowns as he tucks the keys into his cloak, then turns back to the two men sprawled across the stone floor. Dead grass falls all around us, covering their bodies like snow.
“Do you think we’re close?” Phaedron whispers.
I raise my hand to my cheek and realize it’s wet with tears. Magic screams through the air all around us, begging to be used. Begging to be turned into something, into anything.
But now there’s something else, something low and ashen that I feel in the back of my throat. Something that follows the magic like a shadow. Something that burns.
“Yes,” I manage to say. “We’re close.”
Chapter20
Phaedron
IF YOU’D WANT THAT
The door Alindra can’t open is only a few paces away from the men she somehow damn near instantaneously killed. I’m trying not to think about that, about the white-hot magic that exploded in front of her. About how close I was to that magic, how I’d been able to smell the damn thing. How one step forward would have killed me.
Because Alindra is a magician, a damned powerful one, and that thought feels like biting on a blade. She’s beautiful and capable, she’s managed to awaken some part of myself that I’d long ago written off as dead, and she’s a magician. Just like my father, who watched me writhe beneath his polished black boots with a smile on his face. Alindra is a magician, and only the screaming voids below know what she’s truly capable of.
Except, apparently, opening this door. I watch as a dozen different expressions flitter across her face, from confusion to annoyance to a sort of rage, and for a heartbeat I’m reminded of Rowan so forcefully it’s almost painful. Rowan hated a puzzle he couldn’t solve.
Hates. My brother is still alive. Voids help me, I can’t start to think of him in the past tense. I reach for the keys I stole from the guard as Alindra’s lip curls back in a snarl.
“What is this?” she growls.
She raises a palm and smacks the featureless black door in front of us, then hisses as if she’s been burned. I frown at the door. Even I can tell there’s something deeply wrong about this strange slab of unidentifiable metal that’s so dark it seems to pull the light from the air. The grass growing out of bare stone was weird enough, but now the grass is gone, aside from a few charred blades still floating through the air. Something about this black slab of a door and the smooth, cold stone surrounding it makes my skin feel like it’s trying to crawl off my body.
“It’s proof we’re going the right way,” I whisper.
Alindra frowns at me as I raise my hand to trace the door’s dark surface. It’s colder than it should be, this strange metal, and it feels almost oily, like it’s going to leave a stain on my fingertips. Something deep in my gut pulls tight; I suppress a shiver.
“You’ve been able to open every door in this place,” I continue, running my fingers along the sides of the door and then moving inward. “Whatever they’re guarding, whatever the source of their magic is, it makes sense they’d hide it behind something like this. Something magic can’t open.”
Alindra sniffs like she’s trying to find a reason to disagree with me. “What are you doing?” she asks.
My finger catches on something small and rough, and I turn to her with a grin.
“Looking for the keyhole,” I reply.
It’s almost invisible, which I expected, and it’s low and off-center, which I didn’t. I raise the keychain I lifted off the dead human and start clinking together mismatched bits of metal when a scrap of memory tugs at the edges of my consciousness. Standing at another secret door, tucked inside another castle, with Rowan at my side. The gleam in his eyes. The way he showed me how to unlock the doors.
“Check your side,” I say, glancing at Alindra.
