The air left Reina as if she’d been punched in the gut. Her heart jolted, and she turned to the void-sucking blackness of the cavern.
Maior looked up with a grimace in her face, apprehensive. “So you’re going to take me to your grandmother? And I don’t have a have a say, again—”
“What? No.”
They watched each other in confusion. That was when it dawned on Reina: Maior didn’t know the whole truth. Reina sucked in a deep breath. She shoved her bangs out of her face and gave Maior her back.
A hand grazed Reina’s shoulder blade gingerly. “You’re not taking me to your grandmother?”
“No!” Reina roared to the canopy. She was immediately ashamed of herself—for the outburst, for the lack of foresight delivering her exactly where her grandmother wanted her, for the tears uglifying her face. “Do?a Ursulina lied to me! She said it was just an offering of blood—just a little bit: a cut on the hand, and it was done. But it’s not the truth! She lied to get me to go along with all this. To invoke Rahmagut, the damas must die.”
The shaking of her shoulders—she couldn’t stop it. Fury bubbled up her throat, for playing as the pawn her grandmother always wanted. She wanted to scream it out, howl at the betrayal.
Maior’s arms circled her waist. Reina stilled as the woman embraced her, squeezing from behind. It gave her the permission to breathe. She surrendered to the gesture. How Maior was a compass to her turbulence. How it grounded her.
“I would never do that to you,” Reina admitted. “If I knew, I wouldn’t have done this.”
“I believe you.”
They let go, and Reina fully faced her. She’d had her shame; now she needed to act.
“We have to go in, though,” she said in a steady voice, even if she was all earthquakes and fissures on the inside.
“But that’s what Do?a Ursulina wants,” Maior cried, pressing a palm to her heart.
Reina reduced the distance between them, towering over her so Maior would have no doubt of her conviction. Her gaze flickered to Maior’s open lips, a treacherous desire for them assaulting her. But Reina quelled the urge by tightening her jaw, for it was the last thing she needed to be thinking about right now.
“I will not leave you alone. And I will not abandon Celeste. This is not negotiable.”
The corners of Maior’s eyes grew teary, her brows descending. Her lips moved like she had words in her but even she knew the futility.
“There’s no time to take you back. And I don’t know who else on this island she’s roped into this. You are only safe with me.” It was a truth Reina clung to like her life depended on it. Because this was all she had: to mend the mistake she’d made by trusting her grandmother. What life did she have after tonight? All that lay forward was Celeste’s and Maior’s. So she might as well die fighting.
Reina extended her palm. “Do you trust me?”
A breeze tickled the vegetation, loud in Maior’s hesitation. Reina’s veins thrummed, counting every passing second they wasted waiting on her decision. If the answer was a no, well, Reina also deserved that.
Maior sucked in a breath and exhaled, “I’ll support you,” before taking the hand Reina offered. “I’m here. I will help.”
Her touch was cold and clammy, and Reina squeezed it as she allowed herself a smile hidden by the darkness.
She swiftly summoned a flame wisp and led the way into the cave. The incantation used up a fraction of her iridio with a sucking sensation, a ghost of the pain from when she ran low. But it was necessary. Iridio was going to be her guide forward. Reina could feel it, a tug beckoning her to the depths of the cavern.
The light revealed a tunnel carved within the mountain by artful hands. Fine, sculpted designs had been incised along the walls of nozariels, valcos, and winged yares in rudimentary activities: fishing, sewing, harvesting crops, throwing clay, conquering territories. There was also carved symbology of suns, moons, antlers, bat wings, bull horns, and snake ouroboroses spiraling into a void. Some images depicted people turning into bovines turning into tinieblas. Now faded and crumbling from generations of abandonment, the limestone was ragged where it ought not to be, smooth where there used to be definition. The air was stagnant and pungent with decay, the Tierra’e Sol humidity keeping the walls moist. As the flame wisp lapped the tunnel in orange light, encasing them, it revealed a twisting, descending path of black.
The tunnel groaned, as if the mountain stirred above them. Spooked, Maior clutched Reina by the arm in a cold grip, drawing closer. The flame wisp guided them as they crossed the entryway to a vast chamber decorated in statues of stone. They were carved in the shape of people and furniture. A throne room, with no exit or path forward, or at least not one they could immediately see.
“What’s that?” Maior said as she walked to the wall across the chamber, where she ran her hands along the roughness of the stone.
Upon closer look Reina realized the walls were embedded with faint shimmering veins. Not with gems in form or contexture but lines carved in and around the wall, with the faintest trail of iridio encrusted to the wall, twinkling like stars. A tether formed between it and her heart as her palm grazed the rough surface. Underneath her touch, the wall breathed. For a moment she could visualize every pathway and chamber carved underneath this very mountain.
“Turn off the fire?” Maior suggested.
“I don’t need the light to see. I was only keeping it on for you. Chicken.”
Maior gave her a look, and Reina complied, chuckling.
The darkness ate them a second time. Nothing happened at first. Not until Reina listened to her instincts and pushed the magic of her chest forward. Through veins of pumping blood. Through her bones to flesh. Then, like a servant, the chamber reacted to her command.
Veins of blue iridio became the light that revealed the chamber to them. It flowed from her palm to the walls and ceiling, hissing with the whispers of every iridio spell ever cast.
Reina flinched when Maior reached for her chest. “Your iridio—” the human said, her hand finishing the journey and pressing against the fabric over Reina’s heart. “Are you all right to do this?”
Maior knew the consequences as painfully as Reina did.
“It wants us to follow it.”
Maior followed her around the statues, the blue lines directing them to an opening in the chamber, hidden behind the statue of the throne and its caudillo. The doorway was open, the stone door shoved to the side, left ajar by those who’d come before them.
“Down there,” Reina said.
Beyond the door, the lines wrapped around the walls and down a spiraling stone staircase.
They rushed down the stairs, emerging at a pitch-black opening where the blue geomancia abandoned them entirely. Reina summoned another flame, a weak thing bright enough to light only a small perimeter of this new chamber. Ahead was an arched pathway made by two rows of pillars, the history of the chamber recorded in the pictographs and ancient writing carved onto its stone, moss crawling up the base. From beneath the bridge came the soft trickling sound of spring water.
Carved sarcophagi sat on elevated pedestals near the entryway, and Reina circled them to get a sense of the hall’s size. She froze at the sound of a kicked pebble, then hoofed footsteps, followed by a guttural growl; her heart sank at the realization. This chamber had tinieblas.