Page 21 of Court of Bone and Amethyst

I lean back and press a finger to his lips. “It’s okay. You don’t need to explain.” I straighten and pull my pants back up. “I know how you feel about things. It doesn’t matter, because this was the last time.”

“The last time,” Zyren echoes, though something flashes over his face too quickly to read. He pulls his own pants back up and nods. “Yes, I suppose we should get some sleep. Tomorrow, maybe you’ll be ready to share what you learned in your book. And we can find that path out of here.”

“Yes. Tomorrow.”

I turn and head back into the tunnel, drinking in one last look at him bathed in the moonlight. I hadn’t expected things to go like that, and knowing what I now know…what happened between us can’t happen again. It had been risky, even the once.

I shake my head and keep walking. I don’t need to worry about Zyren because he doesn’t feel about me the way that I feel about him.

Zyren isn’t in love with me, so everything is perfectly safe.

Part Two

Chapter Thirteen

Zyren

When the sunrises the next morning, I am fully awake. I hadn’t slept at all since Sarielle and I returned from the tunnel, and the secret library. My head keeps spinning over how close I came to losing her, gone for all those hours. And it keeps spinning over those perfect few minutes with our bodies intertwined…

Sarielle’s golden eyes fixed on mine as she moaned with pleasure and called my name.

Her dark hair cascading over me as she clung to my neck, smelling of flowers and magic.

The whisper of her skin against mine, her legs wrapped around me, her body receiving me as I thrust into her over and over, as we became one being instead of two…

And my mind keeps spinning over the way she’d looked at me when we were finished, her words as she hastily pulled on her pants.This was the last time.

I’d sat there in agony for more than half a day, wondering if she was alive or dead. But now, I wonder if I’ve still lost her. Notbecause of some external threat, but because I’ve been a foolish and unforgivable asshole.

I have to figure out a way to make this right.

Sarielle is still sleeping soundly a few feet away from me in the fireplace room, so I get up quietly. Owyn and Merla are already awake and gone from their makeshift beds. Suspicion simmers in my gut, but I know they can’t get back into the library without Sarielle, and I’d made sure they hadn’t taken any books when they left me late last night as I kept watch for her return. I make my way out to the courtyard, and sure enough, I find them merely practicing spells in the early dawn light.

Off in the distance, I hear a growl from the nightmare, and the call of a couple men. A clash of swords like perhaps some of the warriors are sparring. Down beneath the ground, I hadn’t forgotten that an army waited for us outside the walls. I hope Sarielle is right about this escape route she found in the book. We can’t fight our way through such a large force. We need to get far beyond here so we can sneak away without them realizing we’ve gone.

I head back inside to the kitchen where I gather a small loaf of bread and cut two pieces of cheese. When I return to Sarielle, she’s already sitting up. She stretches and yawns. Even now, in dirty clothes, disheveled from sleep, she is beautiful.

“I got something to eat.” I tear the loaf in half and hand it to her with one of the pieces of cheese.

“Thank you.”

We eat quietly, and when we’re done, I open my mouth to speak. But Sarielle beats me to it.

“I know we need to find the way out of here and get back on the road. Let’s go find the tunnel I read about in the book.” Something flickers in her eyes. “The rest, perhaps, should wait until we’ve escaped.”

I nod. I’m certainly curious what she’s learned, but the Otreyas and Lyonian families have been intertwined for so long, I doubt there’s much in the book I don’t already know. “It’s yours to tell, when and if you want to share it.”

“Can you go get Owyn and Merla?” Sarielle asks. “There is something I must do before we leave. Alone.”

She walks from the room, and I gather Owyn and Merla and the horses—ours and theirs—and what little supplies we can bring. Satchels with the remaining bread and cheese, skins for water, a bit of grain for the horses. Sarielle returns a quarter hour later and leads us to the northern wall of the castle’s perimeter, opposite the gates we entered two nights before.

The walls here are a dozen feet thick, with rooms between the outer and inner layer. I remember, from the times I’d visited decades ago, that they used to house the barracks for the warriors, as well as their equipment and armor. There is also, set in the wall directly due north, a small shrine to the dark goddess, worshipped across all of Aureon. The Valaronians had continued those beliefs even when the nightmare realm consumed them.

It is the shrine to which Sarielle leads us.

She hands the reins of her horse to me and approaches the shrine. It is a simple arch of stone set within the wall, about ten feet in height. Within the concave space, a stone shelf juts out from the wall at the back, just large enough to hold an effigy of the goddess. Her face is worn smooth from time and weather, and a wreath of dried flowers is woven around her feet, no doubt placed there by Owen or Merla. Sarielle reaches to a spot behind the small statue, where an ornate “O” is carved into the stone at the back of the altar. She presses the stone directly in the center of the letter.

The stone gives beneath her fingers, moving inward. A low rumble and a scrape of stone against stone rises from the archway. Sarielle steps back as the back wall of the shrine slidesinward like a door on hinges, revealing a set of wide, earthen steps leading down. Darkness and dust swirl forward to greet us.

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