Page 61 of A Promise of Peridot
He kept his eyes on those paving the way for us, plodding forward as they shared stories and dropping back to peek at the map. More gemstone stalactites overhead. More twiggy, bioluminescent critters scampering at our feet. Antennae and shimmering wings.
His silence was making my chest ache.
“I’m sorry for my behavior back in Citrine,” I said. It was a start. “For stripping, and goading Crawford and...”And throwing myself at you.
“I don’t give a damn about any of that. Only your safety. The rest was a sight to behold.” Kane gave a tilted smile at the memory. “When you told Trevyn he’d be cleaning his loved ones out from under his fingernails for weeks.” He laughed, low and rough. “That one was dark even for me.”
I laughed, too, and allowed myself to look up at him. “Maybe we could try something new.”
Kane’s eyes twinkled in the varied torchlight. “And what might that be?”
“Whoops, wrong way,” Mari called from the front before turning on a heel and passing us. We fell to the back again and I tried to remember Kane’s instruction to sip the air like water.
I willed my voice to be casual. “Friends?”
Hurt flickered in Kane’s eyes, there and gone in an instant. But he jerked his chin in casual agreement. “Whatever the bird desires. I could always use more friends. I’m very lonely, you know.”
“Do you mean that?”
Kane breathed out evenly through his nose. “A little.”
Always so cryptic. I wanted to open his head with a pickaxe and crawl inside.
“What’s that look?”
“I was thinking about taking a pickaxe to your brain.” I flushed. It sounded so much more absurd out loud.
“Dear Gods, I’ve broken her.”
I cocked my head. I had heard the phrase before at Shadowhold, but never growing up in Amber. “Is that what you worship? Gods?”
Kane scratched at his jaw. “It may be more information than you can handle right now, bird.”
I sighed. How much more could there possibly be? “Try me.”
He scanned the dark expanse around us, contemplative. “In Evendell, legend says nine stones, each one a kingdom’s namesake, formed the continent’s core. You worship them, the Stones. Have temples built to them, curse them, pray to them, and on and on.”
I nodded. Amber was the most devout kingdom, with more temples, priests, and priestesses than any other kingdom, except maybe Pearl. I had grown up studying the Stones in all my classes.
“The Fae, my people—our people—believe in Fae Gods. Immortal beings who created our realm, and all the others, including Evendell.”
I wasn’t as shocked as Kane expected me to be. Maybe because to him, this was a great truth—the creation of his world. But to me, it was just a story.
“So the Fae don’t believe in the Stones at all?”
“No, we do. We believe mortals mistakenly refer to the Fae Gods as the Stones they created. There were nine original Fae Gods as well. The Blade of the Sun was hewn by them, and they are the ones who infused the hilt with their nine stones.”
“Original gods? Now there are more?”
“So they say.” Kane shrugged. “It’s not as if they walk among us in Lumera, and I’m not quite as knowledgeable on deity lore.”
The Fae history and folklore—myhistory and folklore—fascinated me. Almost as much as hearing Kane speak of the antiquities he loved so dearly. I wondered how much of this he learned as a boy in his classes, and how much came from his big, dry books.
The unmistakable smell of decaying human flesh hit me like an ocean wave and I dry heaved before clasping a hand over my face. Kane strode faster for the group before us. Everyone had stalled before... something. Without a torch of my own I couldn’t see what it was in the assaulting darkness.
But I couldhear.
The slithering of their scaled bodies. The bloodcurdling screech they produced—
