Nutmeg screamed. Dirt flew up and an immense cloud hung over them. Their eyes and noses ran and when it cleared, the mountain had stopped falling and they saw no sign of Jeredon.
Nutmeg leaped from Bumblebee and flew back over the fallen stone, her short body jumping fearlessly over dirt and rock that shifted when she landed, still moving. She screamed when she came to a snapped tree jutting out of the slide, and began to dig. They saw Jeredon emerge, or at least his torso. Lariel began to walk over the loose slide to help, and it rumbled under her feet.
“Go on,” he shouted to her. “Go on!” He coughed for a moment, then clawed at the debris with Nutmeg, clearing his chest down to his hips. He touched one leg as Meg pulled rocks away from him. “I can’t feel it.”
Brother and sister stared at one another. Lariel said, “I’ll come back for you.”
“I know you will.”
Nutmeg wiped her face with her begrimed hand. “I’m not leaving him, too. I’ll dig him out.”
Rivergrace felt as though the small part of her heart still left broke into pieces. “Meg.”
Nutmeg smiled at her. “I know. But this is Dweller work. Stout bodies, hard heads. Now go on.”
She swallowed a dry lump in her throat, and turned Ribbon away, up the path Lariel had chosen. She rode alone and in silence for a span of moments then Lariel’s mount came after and neither spoke for a good while.
They circled the crag. Lara took out her guide and consulted it without even bothering to hide it from Rivergrace, her severed finger swinging loosely from the string and then pointing up a left fork. Far below them lay the lands of Larandaril, green and stretching as far as the eye could see, heavy with groves and a brilliantly blue river forking through it. A pall of darkness lay over the river when Grace looked at it, but she knew that Lariel did not see it that way.
“Will we reach it before nightfall?”
“I think so. My . . . guide . . . pulls very strongly now.” She pocketed her little finger again. “How do you know if they live or not?”
“Cerat.” Rivergrace touched the sword blade. “It hungers for souls.”
“I can almost hear a noise. It’s like having a bee hanging over your head.”
“Louder, to me, but yes, it does that, too.”
“Cerat,” repeated Lariel. “Deathdrinker.”
“Souldrinker. Rufus told us the name.”
Lariel opened her mouth as if to ask another question, but a quavering howl hung faintly on the mountain air. Rivergrace took her hand from the sword. “That’s not Cerat.”
Lariel tilted her head, her eyes intent as she listened. Then she looked to Rivergrace, and she saw fear in the Warrior Queen’s eyes. “I’ll meet it at the cave, the last passage I can open. From there on . . .”
“I’ll find the Way.”
The howling grew closer, climbing the scale, a piercing cry of hunger and anger, and Cerat faintly mimicked it at her back. Lariel drew her sword. “Dismount.”
She kicked off Ribbon and without another word of explanation, Lariel cut her horse down and then Ribbon. Both horses fell to their knees and then their sides, throats opened in a bloody red gash, bleeding their life out on the dirt. Rivergrace put her hand to her mouth.
“Run. After me. That won’t buy us much time.”
They clambered up the steep side of the cliff, finding that deer’s trail to be more of a goat’s path and then it opened up to a dark maw yawning into the peak, with a singular white marble column blocking its way. They clung to each other, catching their breath, hearing the noise of the Blackwind runner behind them, savaging the horses.
Lariel put her knife to her wrist. “Listen to me,” she said, and she began to talk, quickly, breathlessly, as her blood started to flow down her knife and onto the column, and the mountain opened with a deep moan, and musty air spilled out.
Rivergrace listened, then drew Cerat and went on.
The earth breathed around her. Not as she breathed, not steady movement in and out of air, but a long, steady, quiet moan of rock and dirt and water pushing against one another in its very deepest recesses. She felt it more than heard it and its heaviness; its pressure weighed on her. She could hardly breathe with its weight. Her hearing was muffled. Her throat began to close and her heart to pound, and she could feel the panic welling up in her, the crazed need to claw her way out. Out, out!
Rivergrace stopped dead in her tracks. Both hands wrapped about the sword’s hilt; she leaned on it as if it were the only thing that could keep her upright and on both feet. Its metal body vibrated to her touch. It sang softly to her, a soft ululation for the day, for the air, for the hunting of prey which would spew blood when struck, hot and full of life and color. Rich crimson and sharp-edged bone-shard white, the pink of muscle. Even the death of a soul held colors that this underground imprisoning did not, and it urged her to go find them. It would lead her from the stillness of the caverns and take her out into the air and freedom, if she would only let it.
She laced her fingers tighter about the hilt until her knuckles shone like small moons in the twilight, wrapping her will even harder about it than her flesh, denying it. She would lead it, not it her. When she swung it, it would be because she had made the choice. Cerat growled at her unhappily. The vibration within its metal form grew stronger until her bones ached to hold it, her whole body abuzz with its throbbing. Her teeth rattled until she clenched her jaw tight. The fight to remain in control drove her panic down. She took a step.
Sun slanted inward at her back from the wide cavern mouth, a beam as pointed as the weapon she carried. Its finger jabbed inward and she followed it, afraid of what she would do when the light could no longer reach her path. She had the oiled torch stuck in her waistband, and flint and steel to strike it, but could she put aside the sword long enough to do it? Would Cerat leap out of her control if she took her hands and will from it?
She took one trembling hand from the hilt and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. Heat pooled in the caverns, though she could feel a coolish breeze from somewhere deep ahead. Her side ached. She could feel blood trickle sluggishly down her skin, smell its coppery scent, and that made Cerat hungrier. It had its shrewd side, though. It knew better than to ask her for her own blood.
Not that it didn’t want it, but slyly, it knew that it would have it in sweet time, as if it were death itself and would have all things sooner or later.
Rivergrace pushed herself forward. The cooler air coming toward her was far from sweet. It carried a tang upon it, a rankness akin to that of carrion ripening in the sun. It stained the back of her throat as she breathed and made her choke with it. Something foul and unspeakable waited for her.
Aderro
.
No,
she cried back to Sevryn.
Don’t call me, you’re lost and gone, and all I can do is hope with every step that I move closer to you.
Her footfall echoed in the tunnel.
Aderro.
You could have found another way to save Lariel. To show her what the sword could do and what Quendius was capable of. You could have! Instead of leaving me . . .
Her body began to block the thinning sunbeam from the cave mouth. It flickered like a guttering candle going out, throwing darker shadows in front of her as the cave floor began to slope downward and grow uncertain with broken ground and rock crumbling under her steps.
“You’ve can’t have her. She’s my sister. I pulled her from the river and found her! She’s mine!” Nutmeg’s spice and fire in every word echoed inside her memory.
You belonged to her because she found you.
“No,” Rivergrace said firmly to the earth and stone. “Because we loved each other.”
What does love mean?
It’s like a river, a river that fills you to overflowing, cleanses you, feeds you, cradles you . . . can sometimes even sweep you away in a devastating flood, but a river you would never want to be without. And it flows both ways, like a miracle.
She shook herself from memory. The mountain leaned on her, corrupt and besmirched. “Come out and fight!”
Rivergrace pulled a tangle of hair from her eyes. She wanted something to attack her. To rush on her from the dank, foul unknown in front of her, to pounce on her so that she could cleave it away. With each pass of the sword, she would carve it and let the rage warm her blood, boiling away the fear. Anything would be better than this chilling fear, this uncertainty that beat at her. She called up anger inside of her. The curses at her Vaelinar blood. The raiders who burned her home down and destroyed the Farbranch life. The slag mines that boiled over into her rivers and polluted them, killing all that every drop of water might reach and touch slowly, bit by bit. She would bring it down, the thing that did this,
now
.
If only she could find it.
She stumbled over a rock and crashed to one knee. She bit her tongue as she landed. Sharp pain jolted her bones and lanced through her mouth. She knelt long enough to gather herself. She wanted to hew away at the stone that tripped and hurt her. She shifted Cerat in her hold.
“Show yourself! Come out and meet me”
Her voice echoed harshly, beating off the sides of the cavern. Things skittered and flew past her, wings flailing, bats with their high-pitched screams and blind eyes. She ducked and covered her head, their clawed feet and wingtips scratching at her hair and arms. Then, suddenly, gone.
Did it listen for her? Did it wait below? Demon, demi-God, or perhaps an ancient Vaelinar sitting on a throne of stone? How patient it must be, letting her carry the battle to it, unworried about her existence at all.
The day shifted. The sunbeam slanting thinly through the cave mouth vanished, and she was left entirely in the dark, without even a bat’s high scream to echo around her and show her the walls, the ceiling that grew lower and lower with every movement she made.
She knelt and put Cerat on the pebbled cave floor to slip the torch from her belt. She struck it, three times, flint to steel, before the sparks ignited the torch. It burned fitfully as she took it up in one hand and the sword in the other. The sword twisted, leaping in toward her leg and nearly bit her sharply. She deflected it just in time.
So that was how it was to be. She gripped it tightly in her sweating palm.
The torch lent sight but also bedazzled her a bit with its orange glow. She lowered it and held it in front of her as the cave floor twisted and turned upon itself. The closeness began to choke her again. A stone snake had swallowed her, crushing her in its coils. She would die here. Others might have died before her . . .
“My blood stained these stones once, and will again. When it does, you must fly, Rivergrace. The rest of the journey is up to you to finish.”
“Queen Lariel . . .”
“My blood,” she repeated. “The blood of my family sealed this pact, and we failed in our trust. I’ll spill my life to renew it, but only you can cleanse the river. Now run!”
Lariel took her dagger and opened up her arm, and the Demon dog that guarded the way lunged at her, to hunker down at her feet and lap up each steaming crimson drop. “Run!” It would be bound unless she ran out of blood first.
Grace had, but only a few steps. Behind the massive boulder that fronted the cavern mouth and there she knelt, taking out her own small knife and putting it to her wrist, letting blood run down and pool until she grew faint before tearing her sleeve hem and tightening a cloth bandage about the wound. It would smell her blood and come to it. Come, she prayed, and be filled before the queen runs dry and falls to her sacrifice that opened the path.
The sword twisted in her hand again. She tripped, her shoulder going roughly into a jagged curve in the cave, and the torch falling from her hand as she did. Her curse rang out, echoed, and then she realized the orange glow of the torch fell. And fell. And fell as an ever smaller orb of fire. Then it went out in a shower of tiny sparks as it hit bottom.
Shaking, Rivergrace took firm hold of Cerat again. Now blinded, she used it as a cane, tapping. The hole in front of her seemed endless but she finally found a small way around the rim of it. Sand showered away from each step, but she did not fall as the torch did.
How to find her way?
Aderro. Listen to yourself. Follow your love of the water.
Fresh or salted, clean or foul, it did call to her. She took a deep breath riddled with the corruption of the air, and closed her eyes, and imagined where the water might lie, where the wellspring of the Andredia came up from the rock and down from the mountain, and from which all its waters began. She took each step carefully, knowing that the river might draw her to it as the crow might fly, yet she walked on earth and rock, and treacherous at that. Each halting step she took cautiously so that she would live to take the next.
The cavern walls grew lower and the passage narrower. She could feel it, even through her shut eyes, as it closed in upon her. Her heartbeat echoed through the stone. She thought of her alna, her silver-tipped free flier, and how its heart had beat frantically in the cage of her hands when she’d held it for healing. Her footfalls drummed on the stone.
Then her eyes flew open, and she saw, dimly, a faint glow ahead. And she heard the echo although she made no movement.
She was no longer alone.
Chapter Seventy-Two
CERAT THRUMMED IN accompaniment to the steps as they drew near. Rivergrace could feel it stir in her hands. It wanted to leap out, but she held it close to her even though the smell of her blood made it whine with an irritating buzz that sawed along her nerves. So near to the wellspring now that its corruption left a stain upon her with every breath, like a slimed coating upon her tongue and throat, she paused.