Page 10 of The Queen's Shadow

Her mouth quirked. Of course he wouldn’t. Neither of them could risk losing sight of the other. Even with whatever strange sort of peace lay between them.

“Fine, then,” she said. “But don’t get left behind.”

They crept along the top of the ridge, careful to keep out of sight of the villagers below.

“So, you trust me now?” he whispered. His voice was low but still dripped with that maddening arrogance.

“Absolutely not,” she returned. “But you haven’t tried to kill me yet, so that’s something.”

Arphaxad snorted. “I’ve had plenty of chances to kill you before, Cass.”

She bit back the “ha” that rose in her throat. She’d had plenty of chances to kill him before too. But she hadn’t.

The group of chanters that had gathered at the opening had disappeared inside, and the haggard, wide-eyed men who had stumbled out had made their way to the other side of the enclave, as if they wanted to get as far away from whatever they had witnessed as possible.

“There,” Arphaxad said, his voice hardly above a whisper. She followed his finger to the boulder perched just outside the cave entrance. It was large and flat, wide enough to hide them both.

“I see it,” she said, as way of confirmation.

She followed him down the ridge, acutely aware of his presence ahead of her. He moved carefully, quietly, hardly making a sound in the stillness of the woods.

He reached the boulder before she did, and she dropped into the space beside him. The crushed, blackened shells of the enchanted orb fire lay scattered by the cave. Dust coated her tongue, sulfurous and cloying, and she pulled the edge of her cloak over her nose to help her breathe. The strange white glow that had hung over the valley after the explosion had faded. Cassandra shuddered. She had entered a lot of unsavory spaces in her time as shadow, but this . . . something about this seemed much, much worse.

Arphaxad slipped around the bolder and dropped into the cave entrance. She followed half a beat later.

It was dark inside, and the entrance narrowed as they moved swiftly along, the damp stone ceiling dropping until it was only a few inches above Arphaxad’s head. There wasn’t time to feel their way slowly. They needed to get in, find the information they were looking for, and get out.

The sense of wrongness intensified with every step, pressing against her temples until her head felt like it would crack apart. For a moment, it was hard to breathe, and she forced herself to take slow, steady breaths, just like Andre had taught her.

“I chose you for a reason,” her mentor had told her. “And not just because you are the queen’s sister. You have a level head on your shoulders and a fighter’s spirit. Those are things that can’t be taught.”

The orange glow of orb fire flickered like a pinprick in the distance, casting distorted shadows up against the rock. Something crinkled beneath Cassandra’s boot. She froze, then leaned down to pick it up. A letter, crumpled and boot-marked, with a blank wax seal. She shoved it into her belt.

A moment later, a dark alcove dredged into the rock to their left, and Cassandra caught sight of a flat makeshift writing desk. Paper had been blown every which way—probably from the explosion—and was likely why the letter had flown out into the hallway. She ducked to pick up a few more of the scattered pages. She jumped when she realized how far ahead Arphaxad was, then hurried after him. She had to pull up sharply when she almost slammed into his back.

“Shh,” he said.

Voices echoed from somewhere ahead—a mix of men and women—but it didn’t sound like the standard hum of chatter. The voices moved together in a grotesque, pounding rhythm, the words a mash of sounds, intoned, but moving together as one. A chant.

Cassandra swallowed. Andre may have spent years preparing her to take on the role of queen’s shadow, but she wasn’t sure even he could have prepared her for the wrongness of this.

Arphaxad signaled for them to begin moving again toward the glow and the rising sound of voices. They rounded the final corner and found themselves looking out into a cavern. The path dropped suddenly away, and a narrow wooden staircase tapered down the rock deeper into the massive cavern.

Toward the back, a group of chanters stood in a tight circle, their hands joined as they swayed together in the rhythm of their speech. She could see the pale, white-haired chanter among them, as well as the man who had expressed his disgust for the Inetians. Power crackled in the cavern, a force she couldn’t see but that she could feel pressing deep into her bones.

Horror swirled in the pit of her stomach. There, behind the swaying chanters, was something—a rift, a tear, a distortion, that hung grossly in the air. It was a jagged black gash that pulsed a few feet above the cave floor, a twisted, sucking, vile thing.

She had heard the stories of the monsters that lived in the realm of shadow, a domain of darkness beyond the physical world, one that could only be accessed by magic so powerful it tore apart the fabric of reality. There the shadows fed on the living, and if a rift were fully opened, they could break through with the power to destroy the world.

The rift pulsed, as if trying to tear itself open wider, expanding its reach. The chant rose and swelled, beating back at the crackling darkness.

Arphaxad had called it magic gone awry. Cassandra thought that had been a gross understatement.

Something moved in the cave to the left of the chanters. A thin line of light erupted in the darkness, then slowly widened until it was more than five feet across. Cassandra’s heart beat wildly as, a moment later, one man and then another, both dressed in the gray robes of chanters, appeared as if from nowhere. Cassandra could see the faded outline of the rocks of the cave behind the ripple of light. A moment later, the light drew back together and disappeared with a snap.

Around the cavern, more men appeared, and it was then that Cassandra noticed the doors—twelve in all—that pulsed between filamented forged-metal frames set into the rock, portals to elsewhere. They stood at equidistant intervals around the space, one sitting hardly fifty feet behind the garish rift, its metal frame already warped—but the door still flickered with life.

The rift crackled again at the increase in power as the new chanters joined the circle, and a wave of nausea at the strangeness of the magic rolled over her, hot and fast. They needed to get out of here, now.

---