Page 81 of Fire in Stone

“Come. Let’s get you inside,” she cooed, leading her friend into the gloomy hall of the Sanctuary.

“They’ll kill her,” Ertee sobbed inconsolably. “The bastards will kill her.”

As the two women went in, the rest of thesalamandrasfollowed them in single file. Soon, it was just me and Mother left in the courtyard.

“What will happen to Isar now?” I asked her.

She glanced at me, her features pinched with worry, her gaze slightly unfocused.

“Trial and execution,” she said in a grim, hollow voice, then added, “they may skip the trial.”

Horror chilled me from head to toe. “She’ll be killed? But she did nothing unprovoked. Isar fought to protect us and in self-defense.”

Mother bit her lip, her hand clutching her golden lizard pendant.

“Venomoussalamandrasare not allowed to exist,” she said flatly.

“This world isn’t safe for anyone who’s different,” I repeated the words Isar said to me on my first day at the Sanctuary.

“That’s right.” Mother stared at me.“Different.”

Her troubled expression suddenly turned calculating, which sent a chill of unease down my spine.

“I shall write to the king,” she muttered, turning to go back inside. “We have to beg for his forgiveness, lest his wrath fall on the rest of us.”

Twenty-Three

AMBER

For the rest of the day, Ertee sat on one of the perches. Sometime in the evening, she stopped crying, but the emptiness in her gaze that she had fixed on the stone floor was even more concerning than her tears.

Shortly before sunset, she got up.

Zenada was by her side instantly.

“Where are you going, sweetie?” She placed a gentle hand on her friend’s shoulder.

“Outside,” Ertee replied, her voice hollow, like an echo. “I need some fresh air.”

Zenada hesitated. She looked torn as Ertee headed out into the courtyard. Zenada was clearly reluctant to go outside this close to sunset.Salamandrasdidn’t spend nights in the open, preferring the safety of the Sanctuary walls. On the other hand, I understood, she didn’t want to restrict Ertee in any way today. If she found it easier to grieve outside in the fresh air instead of the confines of the Sanctuary, Zenada wasn’t going to stop her.

“I’ll go with her,” I volunteered. “I’ll keep an eye on her, then come back inside later, after the sun sets.”

Zenada nodded with relief, and I headed for the door.

I lingered in the doorway, not wishing to disturb Ertee’s quiet contemplation as she stood in the middle of the courtyard in the exact same spot where Isar had been taken. The dark blood stains on the ground were barely visible now in the thickening shadows of the evening. But the images of Isar’s fight rose stark and vivid in my mind. All was quiet, but her desperate groans still resonated in my ears.

Ertee walked to the place where the wall of the courtyard disappeared into the mountain of the Sanctuary. Then, she started to climb.

I watched, confused, as she climbed up the mountain in which the Sanctuary was carved, higher and higher.

Gargoyles loved to perch high in the mountains for the night, Elex had told me. They loved to sit on the edge of a cliff, facing east to feel the first ray of sunrise on their skin in the morning.

The harsh reality of thesalamandrasof the Sanctuary made them huddle inside its walls for safety. But maybe Ertee decided to follow her nature tonight and stay on the mountain after sunset? If that was her way of mourning her loss, I wasn’t going to stop her.

When she climbed so high that I could no longer see her, I decided to follow her to keep an eye on her as I’d promised Zenada. Using little protrusions in the rock, I climbed to the point where the wall merged with the mountain, then climbed a little higher until Ertee’s lone figure came into my view again.

She stood on a cliff high above me, staring into the distance where the towers of the Bozyr Peak, the king’s castle, jolted sharply into the burgundy sky. To the place where the woman, who Ertee admitted was the light of her life, had been taken.

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