Claiming the Prince: Book One (33 page)

“We’ll see what Eris has to stay about it,” she replied.

“But I thought he was in love with the nymph.”

“He is.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I told you. It was an accident. He doesn’t even know what he did. If she had been there with him, it would’ve been her, not me.” She twisted, throwing a grin back over her shoulder. “It could’ve been you.”

He drew back, lip curled. “Yet another reason not to get too close to an Elf.”

They flew the rest of the way in silence, until the Eastern Cliffs threaded along beside them and night began to rise. Then she had Gur fly ahead and signaled to Anqa to follow.

Gur and Anqa deposited them in one of the old cliff dwellings and then flew off to hunt.

In the damp cave, Damion laughed, patting what remained of a sculpture carved out of the soft red stone—the bust. “It’s been years since I explored these cliffs, since I was a boy.”

“Since my mother declared them off limits,” she clarified, moving quickly away from the cave opening and the crashing roar of the ocean below.

At the back of the cave, carved steps descended into winding passageways and endless rooms, some grand as Froenz’s hall, and even more intact.

“People lived here?” Honey asked, gazing up at the wall where the remnants of a mural barely showed—little more than the sinuous black lines of dancing figures.

“A long time ago,” she said, “before the sea swallowed the great cities.”

“When the gods walked the Lands,” Kaelan said.

She nodded, though in the deep blue light of encroaching night, she wasn’t sure he could see it.

“We all sleep tonight,” she said.

“No guard?” Damion scoffed.

She set Hero down. The cave floor was littered with dust and the dried grass of bird nesting and small deposits of bat guano. “Hero will stand watch tonight. He will wake us. We all need to sleep.”

“No fire?” Damion asked.

“No fire,” she said. “We leave before dawn.”

She scraped a spot clean with her boot and dropped down onto it, resting her back against the wall.

Closing her eyes, she drifted.

Later, a voice prodded at her.

“
Wake up
.
They’re asleep
.”

She groaned and stretched her sore neck. Hero’s nose brushed hers. She stroked his head.

“
Thank you
.
Stay. Watch them
,” she said to him.

“
Where will you go?”

“
There’s just someone I need to see
.
I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Quietly as she could, she rose. Every rasp of her boot on the loose grit of the cave floor made her wince. Damion slept flat on his back, mouth open, starlight kissing his scars. Honey slept near his feet, in a huddle. Kaelan had moved deeper into the cave, nearer to her, taking up post along the opposite wall and using Endreas’s coat as a pillow. Keeping her distance from him all day had helped weaken their connection. She couldn’t tell if he was sleeping or not. She would just have to trust Hero, who since waking her had delved into the shadows along the edges of the cave.

Turning, she descended the steps.

Down and down. Rustles of rats and bats echoed from connecting chambers. The drip of water and the salty rawness of the sea grew distant behind her as she descended into the chill of stone and places untouched by the sky. She moved swiftly, allowing that habit-place deep in her mind to lead her through the black tunnels. As keen as her eyes were, they found no scrap of light. But she didn’t need any.

Eight years had passed since she’d last traveled these tunnels, but she knew every corridor, every set of stairs. As a child, she’d spent many long hours mapping the old city’s routes.

Finally, she came to the door. In a labyrinth of nothing but dark tunnels and open thresholds there stood a bronze beast of a door. She ran her hands over the cold, filigreed panels. Few people knew about the door or the chamber beyond, except those who had a chance of someday residing there.

Twisting the heavy ring handle, the lock
thunked
, echoing low and deep through the darkness. With a grunt, she pushed open the door. Magical guardian flames wove a flickering wall before her, silver and blue. She shut the door and stepped through the fire, unscathed. She was a Rae. These were her lands. She did not fear its magic—she was its magic.

The fire died behind her. The torches on the walls lit up and up and up in a spiral of flame that dissolved into the looming darkness. The top sat hundreds of feet above. When her father had been buried, she’d peered down over the edge—until vertigo had set in—attempting to see the bottom.

The Well of Souls. The burial chambers of the Raes and Princes of the Eastern Cliffs.

The main entrance to the Well tunneled all the way from Stonehigh, miles and miles. The Well itself was hidden under the moors and the Ironwood, which was home to, amongst a few other creatures, a breed of raven that gained higher knowledge by eating the eyes of unwary travelers and thus absorbing all that they had seen and learned in their lifetimes.

But the ravens were not the most dangerous creatures in the Ironwood. The trees themselves were deadly. Not only sentient and very easily annoyed, they were of a rare composition. Their wood could not be burned or penetrated, because into their living pulp a type of iron was fused. Rightfully, most steered clear of the Ironwood. But the Radiant’s secret stores of knowledge held some particularly unusual information concerning ironwood that was not widely known. A Pixie could touch ironwood and possess it without suffering ill effects, but if she were pierced with it, even a splinter, death was almost assured.

Grasping the climbing rungs, Magda started up.

For a time, she lost herself in the climb, not thinking about Lavana or Endreas or Kaelan or anything, focusing only on the steady inhale and exhale of her lungs, the firm beating of her heart, the sweat rolling between her shoulder blades.

At last, she reached the ledge she’d been seeking, hurrying along its narrow span without looking down—more out of habit than fear.

The entrance to the tomb was like all the others. Only the name carved above differentiated it.

Magda ducked into the passage, which had been bricked into a narrow slit after her mother’s death. She had to shuffle through sideways until she reached the chamber proper. The room was small, stone walls painted with scenes of the living, inscribed with prayers to the gods, heavily laden with chests of gold and silver, swords and shields and spears and axes on the walls. Golden bowls full of gem-encrusted fruits and vegetables were placed amidst similarly opulent goblets and pitchers. Silken clothes and dusty armor hung on forms. Once her people had believed that they needed all of these things in the Godlands. While that belief no longer held, they continued the ritual of it.

As she approached the sarcophagus, she recalled her mother railing against the absurdity and wastefulness of grave goods.

“The soul is only cursed by the material weight of such things,” her mother had said, as she’d sparred with her warriors, taking on two at a time, sweat running down her porcelain skin. Only her lips showed any flush from her efforts, her silver eyes glinting as though polished. “Death is the only true freedom, daughter, remember that.”

Then she’d knocked both of her guards unconscious, striking one on the back of the head with her elbow and then launching off of his back as he fell to kick the other in the temple. And they’d only been sparring. The captain of her guard had laughed—that deep warm laugh of his that had always brought a smile to her mother’s face.

The captain was here too. In the corner, in a tomb of his own, carved in silver and painted in his likeness, his narrow amber eyes, the crooked angle of his nose, the cleft in his chin.

Magda stood before the gold painted face of her mother. She ran her fingers over those full crimson lips.

“Hello, Mother. I’ve come back.” She hung her head, her hand drawing back into a fist at her side. “I know you’ve been disappointed in me. I’ve been disappointed in myself. But . . . that’s not entirely true. I know you would’ve considered it a disgrace that I was beaten and exiled, not given an honorable death. But . . . I was relieved. I was happy. Happier than I was here. You always said death was the only true freedom, but I felt free when I was exiled, Mother. It wasn’t life that was the prison. It was
this
life.”

She glanced over at the captain, who gazed down at her with those empty painted-on eyes, forever watching over her mother’s tomb.

“Cavan,” she said to him, though it had been many years since she’d even thought about him.

He’d been executed for treason. Yet, in her final rites, her mother had requested that Cavan's body be moved to the spot where the Radiant's most trusted servant was placed—often her Prince, but not always. Magda had been so young when Cavan had been tried and killed that she couldn’t recall what acts of treason exactly he’d been accused of, only that her mother was never the same after his death. Not that her mother had ever been light-hearted, but after Cavan was gone, Magda didn’t remember seeing her mother smile in the same way as she had when he was alive.

Magda gazed up at the captain’s dark eyes, the echo of his laughter rising from the forgotten depths, her mother’s smile . . .

Magda looked back down at her mother.

It had been done quietly, she knew, Cavan’s body moved from its burial plot to her mother's tomb here. At the time she'd been too caught up in plotting her next move to give it much thought.

“But you loved him, didn’t you?” Magda murmured.

In one of those scintillating moments of revelation, the past suddenly became clear.

“And he loved you.” She sat back on her heels. “I remember now. The arguments you had with Father and the counselors. Father must have realized. That’s why Cavan was executed . . .” She searched those foggy depths of her memory, pulling forth the names of her mother’s counselors at the time.

Magda had only been four or five, but their stern faces came back to her. Moren, with the hooked nose, who died from a fall from the gallery at the library, a broken neck. Uli, the dashing one, also found dead. Stabbed by his lover in a jealous rage . . .

She lifted her head and looked down at her mother. “But it was you, wasn’t it?” She rose to her feet. “You killed them all, didn’t you? One by one.” She looked back up at Cavan. “For him. Because they made you execute him. You always told me never to let anyone too close, to keep my guard up. Your head, your heart, you said, never let anyone into them. But you did.”

She thought back to her father, with his bright blue eyes. He'd drowned while taking his daily morning swim in the sea, before even the captain had been executed.

“You killed him too. Didn’t you, Mother?”

Her fingers touched the stone above the likeness of her mother’s breast. It was strange to realize all of this now, so suddenly. In hindsight, it all seemed so obvious. She wondered how widely known the truth had been at the time. Not that it mattered to anyone now. Murder was practically a sport in noble Pixie families. She supposed she should’ve hated her mother for killing her father, if that’s what she had indeed done—and Magda didn’t doubt her mother had been capable of such a thing. Her mother had not become Radiant with smiles and votes and pretty speeches like a human politician. Spilling blood was the only way to win the right to reside at Stonehigh.

She skimmed her mother’s cheek. “I forgive you, Mother, if you forgive me.”

She threw all of her weight against the top of the sarcophagus.

The lid ground and groaned. Dust shifted and ran off the old tomb in gray streams and puffed up in the air, coating her tongue and gagging her. The musty, dry odor of the mummy within, tinged by the pungent aromatic herbs and oils that anointed her mother’s linen-wrapped corpse, was strangely sweet. A mask, another golden image of her mother’s face, appeared through the wafting drifts of dust. The mummy had been clothed and heavily ornamented. Her hands, laid across her belly, were clad in her finger-knives.

Magda lifted her left hand, the pinky, the broken ghast blade. With a downward push and a twist, while her thumb engaged the locking mechanism, she was able to detach the sheath from the rest of the knives. She laid it down on her mother’s sunken chest and then grasped the gold bracer on her mother’s wrist, performing the same push, twist, and pop on her mother’s left pinky blade. She held it up. The sheath was tarnished from disuse, the figure, a rather unimpressive one, a slender tree. Snapping it onto her own pinky, she put her empty ghast blade sheath in place of her mother’s and then leaned over the edge, planting a kiss on the forehead of her mother’s death mask.

“I hope you are happy and free,” she said.

She shoved the lid back into place.

A
NQA CRAMMED
her rear into the cave, fanning her feathers and kicking dirt into their faces.

“Control that damned bird of yours,” Damion barked, as he shouldered his kit and then picked up the manticore venom sack.