Page 106 of Edge of the Wild

“Lia, no,” he whispered. “There could be anything down there.”

“Or nothing. Most likely nothing.” She ignored the nervous jumping of her stomach. “They’ve had us at their disposal all this time. If they were going to kill or rape us, they would have done so.”

He let out a breath. “Not exactly reassuring.”

“Don’t you want to know what sort of stupid setup they’ve got down there? I bet it’s a papier-mâché dragon with one man working its front and another its back end.”

He snorted at that, lips touched with a fleeting smile. “I’m coming with you.”

“I didn’t figure you wouldn’t.”

A quick word left the other standing unhappily behind, surrounded by torch-bearing Strangers. Amelia ducked through the curtain of roots, Malcolm close behind her, and followed Connor’s bobbing torch down into the abyss.

She was struck immediately by the awareness that this was nothing like the small caves close to Drake Hall that she’d explored with her siblings and cousin as a child. Those had been small, cramped spaces, too warm from the sun beaming in through the openings, their voices echoing back quick and muffled. The ceilings had been earth and only a few small bats had huddled in back.

The first thing she noticed was the cold. A deep, damp, seep-into-your-bones cold, and a breeze touched her face, one that smelled of water and minerals. The torch revealed deep gouges in the rock face of the wall that she refused to call claw marks. Bats twittered overhead, their eyes like shiny black beads, the floor dusty with their guano. Above the scuff of their footfalls, she heard the steady, distantplinkof dripping water.

The floor sloped down, and down, and down, and then, to her surprise, reached a switchback turn.

“How deep are we going?” she asked Connor.

“We’re nearly to the first den,” he said.

“Den?”

“We found five down here, though exploration proved there’s room for many, many more. A whole family lived here once, several generations of it.”

“You know I still don’t believe you,” she said as a warning.

“Oh, you will.”

Around the turn, the path steepened – it looked nearly terraced, with sharp drops giving way to gentler slopes. Here were more marks – many more, crowded along the edges of the terraces, and the bats were gone. The ceiling had grown tall enough that the light of the torch no longer reached it, the black void overhead more than a little unsettling.

Connor turned sharply right, and before she could call out saw that it was another opening, a wide, irregular oval that led into an inner chamber. The light fell on pale, gleaming arcs that threw black shadows over the floor – and after a moment, she realized what they were.

Bones.

“Drakes are predators,” Connor said, stepping forward to toe at a ribcage large enough to have belonged to a cow – maybe a bull. “From what we’ve observed, they eat what they kill when they kill it, but some of the fossils down here give proof to squirrelling their food away and eating it in privacy.”

Malcolm said, “So you threw some bones down here. That proves nothing.”

Amelia frowned. “Fossils?”

“Just so. Let me show you.”

He stepped around the cow skeleton and led them deeper into the “den,” past more scattered bones: deer, lion, a few that looked alarmingly human that she didn’t want to examine closely. Bones that were yellowed, but gleaming, old, but not ancient.

The torchlight skipped up across a shape that Amelia at first took for a boulder. It was the chalky, dusty color of old stone…but then Connor thrust the torch forward and she saw a round opening, and below that...

Amelia gasped, involuntarily.

“My father,” Connor said, was a better scholar than my brother or me. A bookish man. He went about interesting us in it all the wrong way: lots of being kept indoors on pleasant days and being quizzed and needled until we loathed his teachings on principle.

“But I always found the biological history of Aquitainia to be rather interesting. For instance: long before the first war with the Sels, when they were visiting as merchants – this would be shortly after the Úlfheðnar colonization – they brought with them great beasts of burden that become something of a fashion here.”

“Elephants,” Amelia murmured, stunned.

Connor shifted the torch, following the big, swooping curve of a fossilized tusk. “It’s been more than a century since elephants walked these lands.”

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