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Instead, there was a threat to the magic, a sensation like a watchdog snarling a warning.
Tared abruptly stepped back. On the other side of the doorway, Edored bit out a baffled curse, blinking at the light that flickered restlessly around his body.
‘Perhaps,’ Lyn said, wrinkling her nose in obvious concern, ‘we should get the hell out of here.’
But now that I’d felt it, the attention of the forest lingered even as we found our way back to the courtyard, omnipresent in the dusty, rosewood-scented air. Somehow, the temple and the heart of the forest were one and the same thing – not unlike the way the Mother and Korok had built the Crimson Court straight above the centre of the Labyrinth.
Was it the magic of the forest that kept the temple from crumbling? And if it was, could it be the magic of the forest that had kept Zera alive, too?
I wanted to pull Creon aside, tell him about my theories, watch that sparkle of brand new thoughts light up his eyes as we discussed whatever secrets might be hiding within these marble walls. But with his winged back still turned firmly towards me, I barely dared to look at him – he’d become like a red-hot iron that would burn me before I even touched it.
What if I just got lost in this maze so he had an excuse to come looking for me?
Would he even care to look for me, after the last words we’d exchanged this morning? Or would he just wait for Tared and Lyn to pull me from my hiding place?
I made no attempts to get lost.
The courtyard had become an assemblage of silhouettes, the paths barely visible in the last light of day. We found our bags, then followed Lyn and the fire in her palm to the high gallery left of the temple, where Creon had discovered bedrooms and kitchens during his late night visit. The first door we entered revealed a surprisingly cosy apartment, no trace of rot or ruin except the thick layer of dust on the floor.
A quick exploration revealed five single bedrooms, each of them nearly identical with their dark wooden floors and peach-coloured clay walls. A spacious kitchen formed the heart of the house, at its centre a table that could easily fit fifteen people. There was a bathroom, too, but when I turned the tap above the bathtub, only some slimy green drops came out.
‘Not lavish enough for your taste, Thenessa?’ Tared said when I pulled a face, the fae title an amiable jab. Out of sheer habit, I flung a flicker of red at his head. He dodged easily, and the bathroom tiles cracked behind him.
‘Could you wait until after dinner before you kill each other?’ Lyn yelled from another room.
‘Are we killing people?’ Edored said eagerly.
For a moment, I forgot to be annoyed with them and their stupid honour as we returned to the kitchen, where the fire was already burning, flames reflecting in the copper pans and the empty glass bottles. But my eyes were drawn to Creon’s motionless figure at the table before I could stop myself, and the frostiness in his expression was enough to send my mood plummeting back to rock bottom.
Surely I could find some way to pull him aside in this place, couldn’t I? But if I didn’t manage, if we had to continue this nerve-wracking dance for the full duration of our journey …
It seemed an eternity ago that we’d joked and laughed and fucked in his bedroom in the Underground. However I’d disappointed him since, I didn’t want to wait another eternity to find out what the consequences were.
‘I’m thinking this might be a good moment for me to fade back to the Underground for news and provisions,’ Beyla said, interrupting my fretful thoughts. ‘Any other errands I might as well run while I’m there?’
‘Oh.’ Edored sounded unusually bashful as he stomped into the kitchen behind me, pulling his sword from his shoulders in that universal sign of an alf at home. ‘Could you check if Nen is back from Gar Temen yet?’
I wasn’t sure what was more bewildering: Edored remembering someone else’s troubles, or the fact that no one in the room besides me seemed to find it at all surprising that he did. Beyla didn’t even blink as she sighed and said, ‘Of course.’
No one had any additional requests. She vanished without further ado, leaving the rest of us in the comforting warmth of that temple kitchen with its low wooden ceiling and its dusty rosewood smells.
Creon cooked, according to what had already become an unchallenged routine. He didn’t ask for my assistance this time, though. I tried to distract myself by wiping dust from furniture and listening to Lyn, Tared, and Naxi as they exchanged theories on where a goddess could be hiding if it wasn’t in her own temple. None of their ideas were very convincing, and the tones of their voices betrayed that they knew it themselves.
‘But what if the plague magic doesn’t harm her?’ Lyn was saying for the third time in ten minutes, sounding doubtful. ‘It’s her own magic after all. And what if—’
‘If it doesn’t harm her,’ Tared interrupted with a groan, ‘then why has she never come forward in all these centuries?’
‘Perhaps she doesn’t like war? Perhaps she decided—’
Her voice stilled abruptly as a new shadow appeared between me and the fire.
I spun around, expecting to find Beyla with the provisions she’d brought. But the food baskets were nowhere to be seen, and instead …
The greeting I’d been planning to utter froze somewhere in the back of my throat.
I’d never seen Nenya bow her head before. Had never seen her without her perfectly reddened lips or her meticulously drawn eyebrows or her elaborately braided hair, without the expression of stubborn pride that made even the grisly scars on her face look like mere annoyances. But she clung to Beyla’s arm now as if that support was all that kept her knees from giving in, her black hair an unkempt mess, dark lines of earth beneath her nails. Her skin was even paler than usual, a sickly, powdery white that revealed the blue lines of every single vein in her hands and face.
She looked like hell. Had Beyla told us she was here to fulfil a last dying wish, I might have believed it.
