Bryce tried, “I’d feel better if I had my sword.”
Azriel said nothing, face impassive. Fine. Sighing, Bryce surveyed the carvings on the floor. Whorls and faces and—
The hair on her arms rose.
“These are Midgard’s constellations.” Bryce pointed to a cluster. “That’s the Great Ladle. And that … that’s Orion. The hunter.”
Hunt. Her Hunt.
Her companions, the tunnels, the world faded away as she traced the stars, plotting their path. The Archesian amulet warmed against her skin, as if working to clear the wards around her.
“The Archer,” she breathed. “The Scorpion and the Fish … This is a map of my cosmos.” Her boot knocked against a raised half-orb, a screaming face carved into it. “Siph.” The outermost planet. She went to the next, a similar mound with a grave male face. “Orestes.”
“Orestes?” Azriel asked sharply, drawing her attention back to where he and Nesta still stood at the tunnel archway. “The warrior?”
She blinked. “Yes.”
“Interesting,” Nesta said, head angling. “Perhaps the name came from the same source.”
Bryce indicated the next mound, the face of a bearded old man. “Oden.” The next, closer to the center of the room, was a young, laughing male. “Lakos.” Another mound rose on the other side of the star, massive and helmeted. “Thurr,” she said. Then she pointed to a mound with a female head. “Farya.” And beyond Farya, a large, raised mound with snaking tendrils. “Sol,” she whispered, indicating the sun-shaped thing.
She scanned the room again and turned to the eight-pointed star. Directly between Lakos and Thurr. “Midgard.” The name seemed to echo in the chamber. “Someone went to an awful lot of trouble to make this floor. Someone who’d been to my world and then came back here.” Bryce glanced over a shoulder to Nesta, the warrior’s face unreadable. “You said there was a harp on the eight-pointed star?” A shallow nod. “What kind of harp? Was it special in any way?”
“It can move its player between physical places,” Nesta said, a shade too quickly.
“What else?” Bryce asked, and her chest glowed again.
Azriel lifted a hand toward Nesta, as if he’d cover her mouth to shut her up, but she said, “The Harp is Made. It can stop time itself.”
“It stops time?” Bryce’s knees wobbled.
She could think of only one group of people in her own world who’d be able to create stuff like that. Who, if they had indeed Made such objects, had a really good reason for wanting to get back into this world. To claim them.
“Was there ever,” Bryce ventured, a sudden hunch taking form in her mind, “a Made object called the Horn?”
“I don’t know,” Nesta said. “Why?”
Bryce gazed at the eight-pointed star, the very heart of this chamber, of this map of the cosmos. “Someone put your Harp there for a reason.”
“To keep it hidden,” Azriel said.
“No,” Bryce said quietly, facing the star fully, her free hand drifting to touch the matching scar on her chest.
It had led her all the way here. To this exact spot, where the Harp had been.
“It was left for someone like me.”
“What do you mean?” Nesta demanded, voice bouncing off the rock.
But Bryce went on, the words tumbling out of her faster than she could sort them, “I think … I think all those carvings in the tunnels might be to remind us of what happened.” She pointed to where they stood, the passage behind them. “The carvings tell a story. And they’re an invitation to come here.”
“Why?” Azriel asked with that lethal softness.
Bryce stared at the eight-pointed star for a moment before she said, “To find the truth.”
“Bryce,” Nesta cautioned, as if reading her thoughts.
Bryce didn’t so much as look back as she stepped onto the star.
18
Hunt coughed, seeing stars with every heave as he sprayed blood.
“Fuck, Athalar,” Baxian grunted from where he hung on the other side of Danaan, though he wasn’t much better.
They’d had all of a few hours on the floor before Pollux had returned and hauled them back up. Hunt hadn’t been able to stop screaming as his shoulders dislocated again.
But Pollux had been called away somewhere, and apparently there was no one else in the palace suitably fucked up to torture them, so they’d been left here.