With the matter settled, Nyx headed to the archway. Aamon padded alongside her, glaring all around, challenging anyone to stop him.
As she joined Shiya and Rhaif, Xan nodded her approval, then stared across the group. “As to the third…”
Nyx studied those remaining. Who else bears the gift of bridle-song?
Xan’s gaze settled on someone Nyx would least suspect of such a talent.
Frell stiffened. The alchymist looked shocked and dismayed, maybe even offended. “Me?”
Xan simply stared.
He scoffed loudly. “Impossible.”
Xan spoke, as if to a child. “I hear faint chords rising from you. Perhaps you’ve grown deaf to it, putting so much stock in what’s here.” She touched her fingertips to her brow, then lowered her palm to her chest. “Rather than what lies here.”
Frell did not look convinced.
Kanthe nudged his former mentor with an elbow. “You did tolerate me. That says you do have a heart in there somewhere.”
Xan kept her gaze on the alchymist. She lifted her staff and traced a finger down the shells adorning her cane. “Consider this. What was it that first drew your interest into the mysteries of the moon, a study that led to your discovery of the doom ahead?”
Frell frowned. “Pure scholarly interest, that’s all.”
Still, Nyx heard doubt growing in his voice, in the crinkle between his brows. She could see him reevaluating his entire life in that moment.
“I was told you spent many years at the Cloistery,” Xan said. “Like Nyx. In the shadow of The Fist, home to the bats who stir the air with their warnings. I believe, somewhere deep inside you, you heard their fears. It drove you to your later studies, to seek answers to those mysteries.”
Frell’s eyes grew wider, a hand drifted to his chest.
Xan turned to the stairs. “Moonfall swiftly approaches. Any hope for the future lies up there.”
Frell took a step forward, then another, unable to resist.
Nyx searched the steps, remembering her dream of a fiery mountaintop, the clash of war engines, and the moon crashing toward the Urth. She had been so focused on struggling to survive these past days that she had forgotten the larger threat that had drawn them all here.
She kept a hand on Aamon’s flank, feeling the silent growl vibrating in his chest. So much blood had been spilled to bring her to these steps. She had no choice but to follow this through to the end.
If there are any answers up there, I must find them.
50
KANTHE WATCHED THE departing group climb the steep stairs. He kept vigil until they disappeared, one after the other, into the clouds.
Jace stood next to him, sagging as Nyx vanished away. “What can they hope to find up there?” he muttered.
Pratik, the Klashean alchymist, offered one explanation. “It’s said there is an ancient stone circle atop the Shrouds. The Northern Henge. Its presence was perhaps used to derive the name Dalal??a, which in the Elder tongue means deathly stones.”
Kanthe gave the man a sidelong glance. “That’s certainly reassuring.”
Jace paled. “I grew up in the Shield Islands. We have a henge down there, too.”
Pratik nodded. “The Southern Henge.”
“I’ve been to it,” Jace said. “It’s nothing but a ring of giant mossy slabs, a few of which had been knocked over ages ago. It sits in a sprawling heather where we graze our sheep. There’s nothing special about it.”
Pratik disagreed. “According to several scholars at the House of Wisdom, your henge is believed to have astronomical significance. Though in truth, no one can quite discern the meaning behind their orientation.”
“Do you know who placed those stones?” Kanthe asked. He remembered Xan’s assertion that the Shrouds were Shiya’s home. He pictured a bronze battalion hauling huge boulders over their heads and stamping them into those heathers.
Pratik shrugged. “Those stones date to the Forsaken Ages, so no one truly knows.”
Jace returned his attention to the stairs. His face was pinched with even more worry.
Ahead, Llyra crossed toward them. Her expression was dark and irritated. Earlier, Kanthe had overheard her last words to Rhaif as she pointed at the bronze statue: Don’t lose her.
Kanthe suspected the woman’s concern was not about Shiya’s well-being, but about her worth. Llyra had eyed Shiya like a ranchholder judging a prized ox, calculating how much gold all that bronze might fetch if it were melted down.
She joined them, trailed by a Kethra’kai scout who had been left with them, a wiry young man named Seyrl. She glanced around the group. From the sour set to her eyes, she was not impressed with what she saw.
“Prince Kanthe.” The use of his title sounded mocking. “What do you propose we do now? I heard you mention something about sending a signal.”
He nodded and stared back at the alder forest. “Hopefully, with luck, we might have a means of escaping this place, if I can lure them here.”
He turned from the cliff and headed to a flat rock. He laid his bow atop it and fished a pair of arrows from his quiver. He undid the ties of an oilskin satchel secured to his belt and removed two eggs of waxed leather. They were packed with alchymical powder and had threads soaked in flashburn draping from them. The pirate Darant had supplied them to Kanthe back on the Sparrowhawk.
He carefully tied an egg to each of his arrows, just behind their bone tips.
Jace stood next to him, staring up at the mists. “When will you launch them?”
Kanthe kept working. “As soon as I’m confident Nyx and the others are off those stairs and into the other section of copper tunnel. I don’t want to risk our signal drawing the eye of the enemy this way, at least not until those cliffs are empty.”
He secured another of the powder-eggs to an arrow. He planned to shoot one above the mists and another below it. Each would burst into a small cloud of blue smoke. He had to hope the legion’s forces continued to focus on Havensfayre. If not, he had to pray such a signal would be dismissed as the mere billow from a campfire.
Still, more than anything, he needed this signal to catch the sharp eye of the Sparrowhawk.
That is, if the ship is still out there.
As he worked, he glanced back to the stairs. He had consulted with Xan before the group left. She had told him the tunnel overhead lay the same distance above the mists as below them. Knowing this, he had been keeping rough track of the passage of time.
He was as anxious as Jace to fire off his signal, but he knew he had to hold off.
It’s far too soon.
He glanced back to the cliff.
Jace had already returned his attention in the same direction. Kanthe remembered the journeyman’s pleading words to Nyx.
You have to come back.
Kanthe concurred. It had pained him to see her climb those stairs, far more than he would ever admit. Lately, he had to keep reminding himself that Nyx could be his half-sister. Still, he couldn’t entirely quash down certain feelings that had begun to warm through him, no matter how much cold water he kept dowsing atop them.
He glanced to Jace. He remembered how he had misjudged the journeyman, believing him to be craven and soft. But now, as he watched Jace staring up, he read the full depth of the man’s heart. It shone in his face for all to see, unabashed and unafraid.