Page 46 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

Nyxiana goes down ahead of me, one hand trailing the wall. There are lights set into the root at intervals, small and pale. They come up as she passes them, go down again behind me. Nobody lit them. Nobody’s been down here to light anything in a long time.

Walking behind her doesn’t work on me the way walking behind a stranger does.

“It isn’t noon,” I say. “I’m under a fae castle looking for pieces of a thing nobody’s seen whole in a thousand years.”

She looks back over her shoulder and gives me the first real smile I’ve seen since we left the room.

“You say that like it’s a complaint.”

“I’m making conversation.”

“You’re making a report.”

“That’s the only way I know how to make conversation.”

“I know.”

Twenty more steps down. The light behind us is doing less and less while the pale lights in the roots do more.

“How did you land on this place?” I ask.

“Something Lachlan mentioned.”

In the room this morning she told me she’d turned it up in the court records. Those are two different things.

I wasn’t listening properly the first time - that’s the likeliest answer, the one I take. A woman who reads nine languages says a thing one way upstairs and another way an hour later. It means nothing.

She goes quiet after that.

Not the quiet she uses on a room full of people, that’s a working quiet. This one has her attention sitting on nothing. She’s a realm and a half from where she was an hour ago.

One realm nearly finished, three points in hand by the end of the morning. That would put anybody somewhere else.

Or she’s had the morning to think about last night and she’s arrived somewhere I won’t like. I turn that over once and put it down. She came down these stairs in front of me and has been within reach of my hand the whole way. Whatever this is, it isn’t that.

I don’t push it.

The growth thins out the deeper we go. Roots gives way to plain rock. The warmth goes out of the walls a few steps at a time, so gradually I’m cold before I can name where it started. By the time the stair bottoms out there’s none of the fae left anywhere. Bare stone. Carved symbols along the lintel, worn soft at the edges.

There’s a ward across the threshold. It reaches for her, takes what it wants out of her blood, lets us through.

The room on the other side is bigger than the staircase had me expecting. Round, low-ceilinged, with a shallow basin cut into the middle of the floor and a channel running out of it to a drain at the wall. Whatever they cleansed in here, they wanted somewhere for it to go.

The air is dry and dead. No charge in it. After two days of Doria working at my skin every waking minute, the absence of it is the loudest thing in the room.

Nothing in here tells you where to look. No shelf, no stand, nothing cut into any wall.

It starts in my chest.

It’s the same thing that put my hand on the stone in Drakoria and the same thing that walked me across the North Range to a slab nobody had lifted in a thousand years. I don’t argue with it any more this time than I did before. I follow it along the back wall with my palm against the rock.

It sharpens low, at a seam I’d have walked past twice without it.

The stone comes away in two pieces. Behind it is a hollow no wider than my palm, cut to fit what it holds. The third point lies on its side in the dark.

I close my hand around it.

Heat answers under my ribs.