Page 14 of Heart's Escape

I nod. I hadn’t even considered going home. King Grathgore would take it out on my family if I dared to even contact them, let alone show up on their doorstep. Phaedron rubs his hand across his chest, like we’ve just decided something, and then turns to me with that same strange expression, the one that looks like it’s struggling to be a smile.

“So, where is the next anomaly?” he asks.

His question jolts me out of my daze of half-remembered details about the ranch where I spent what little childhood I had. I frown at him, but Phaedron doesn’t look like he’s trying to tease me. Honestly, he only looks very, very tired.

“I mean, where’s the next passage to the Lands Below?” he continues, twisting his left hand in the air between us as though he were tracing the borders of a portal. “Where do we find it?”

I open my mouth, but my words fail me. He’s being serious, isn’t he? He doesn’t know.

“There isn’t one,” I stammer. “There’s no way into the Lands Below. Not anymore.”

Phaedron’s face twists. For a moment, he looks like someone whose illusion magic is being pulled away. Then he meets my eyes again, and that soft smile might as well have vanished to the Lands Below. His face is all hard lines and sharp edges.

“Then how do we make one?” he asks.

The sound that slips through my lips is almost a laugh and almost a whimper. I slam my hands over my mouth to stop any of its companions from escaping the cage of my throat.

“I’ve seen a magician do it,” Phaedron continues. “Back in my world. Lythienne, one of our magicians, she opened the portal that brought me to your palace. How do you do something like that?”

Wind shakes the trees above us. Stars, I feel cold. Opening a portal to the Lands Below might be possible, theoretically. The feel of the anomaly rises in my mind, hard and cold like oil-slicked steel. It had a scent and a flavor, something that I might be able to replicate if I had all the magical energy of an entire kingdom to draw upon and nothing but time. But—

“That’s impossible,” I spit.

Phaedron’s eyes widen. “Why?” he asks.

I frown. What a stupid, stupid question.

“Because even if I could weave a spell like that,” I reply, “I’d need a ridiculous amount of magic to do so. That’s why magicians work together, you know, to amplify the magic between us. Something like that portal, or the anomaly, stars! You’d need the power of an old god or all the Towers of the Silver City if you were going to do it alone.”

Phaedron frowns as he stares down at his hand. Somewhere in the distance, a hawk screams into the lengthening shadows. When Phaedron turns toward me, that hint of a smile is back on his lips. The fading light catches his eyes and makes them look almost as transparent as ice.

“So,” Phaedron asks. “How do we find an old god?”

A sound slips out of my mouth, something that should be an objection but instead comes out as a sort of hopeless laugh. He doesn’t know. This man really doesn’t know anything about our world.

“You can’t,” I reply. “The old gods are all gone, dead or captured or fled all the way across the ocean.”

My voice fades like Phaedron’s smile. He’s still watching me with those pale, deathly serious eyes.

“Then we’ll go to the Towers of the Silver City,” he announces.

I open my mouth, then close it. There’s a strange twist to his lips, almost like he’s daring me to tell him it can’t be done.

Which it can’t. I’ve never been to the Silver City, of course, let alone to the Towers; I’ve never even been outside the boundaries of the Kingdom of the Summer, not since I was a child riding at my father’s side. But everyone knows about the Silver City and the mysterious, terrifying White Riders who control the Towers.

Well, everyone except Phaedron.

I’m still staring at him with my mouth wide open, like an idiot, as he brushes the palm of his hand across his thighs. His right sleeve still hangs empty, and it’s probably a bad sign that he hasn’t renewed the illusion he wore when he first appeared in this world. Maybe he’s too tired to work his magic right now. Or maybe he doesn’t trust me enough to weave magic around me. Maybe he thinks I’ll steal it again, like I did when Malron turned his flames on us.

I shiver as Phadeon turns his face toward the sinking sun. I owe him another apology, a better apology, but I’m not sure how to find the words.

“So,” Phaedron says, shielding his eyes as he watches shadows rise from the dusky flanks of the mountain. “Which way to the Silver City?”

I shake my head and try to swallow. My mouth and throat are dry, my hands are scratched and bloody from climbing the cliff, and my body aches in dozens of new and interesting places.

We can’t go to the Silver City. Even if we manage to avoid Grathgore’s army, which will be looking for both of us soon enough, we’ll never make it into the Towers. I saw one of the Towers’ magicians once before. She wore an elegant red gown with gold-embroidered dragons along the sleeves. And her hands were locked in black manacles, with a chain leading from her delicate wrists to the fingers of the man who stood beside her.

And yet. My hands creep across my abdomen, wrapping the little spark held within my body, and a fierce, wild desperation rises in the back of my throat. I was willing to throw myself through the anomaly, wasn’t I? After everything I’d heard about the horrible, freezing Lands Below and its murderous inhabitants, I was going to dive into that darkness with my bag of stolen gold and the slim hope that my sister Ithronel might still be alive down there, and build a new life for myself. For both of us.

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