A gentle hand rested on her shoulder. Nesta.
“We need to tell Rhys,” Azriel said hoarsely. Like he was still reeling from all he’d heard. “Immediately.”
Bryce’s gaze snapped to his face. The concern and determination there. Everything he’d seen … it was a threat to this world, to the people in it.
Azriel asked her with terrifying calm, “What happened to the Horn?”
Bryce held his stare, seething, beyond trying to spin any bullshit.
But Nesta said, “She is the Horn, Azriel. It’s inked into her flesh.” She lowered her hand from Bryce’s shoulder and peered at her. “Isn’t that right? It’s the only thing that would have made your tattoo react that way earlier.”
Azriel’s hazel eyes flickered with predatory intent. He’d carve it out of her fucking back.
If she ran for the exit tunnel … They’d said something about a climb out of here, then a hike down a mountain.
But this court was an island. She wouldn’t be able to get away from them.
Azriel began circling her with an unhurried, calculating precision. Bryce turned with him, keeping him in sight, but doing so exposed her back to Nesta, who she suspected might be the apex predator in the room.
“That’s how you got to this world,” Nesta went on, backing up a step—no doubt to provide space to draw Ataraxia. “Why you, and no one else, can come. Why you said no one would be able to follow you here. Because only you have the Horn. Only you can move between worlds.”
“You got me,” Bryce said, throwing up her hands in mock surrender and taking a step out of Nesta’s range. “I’m a big, bad, world-jumping monster. Like my ancestors.”
“You’re a liability,” Nesta said flatly, eyes taking on that silvery sheen—that otherworldly fire.
“I told you guys a hundred times already: I didn’t even want to come here—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Nesta said. “You did come here, to the place where the Daglan are still apparently dead set on returning.”
“The Asteri would need the Horn to open a portal. They might find me, but they can’t get in.”
“But you want to go home,” Nesta said, “and for that you’ll have to open a door to Midgard. What if Rigelus is right there? Waiting to come through?”
Bryce turned to keep facing Azriel, but—
Only shadows surrounded her.
Nesta had distracted her, enough that her focus had slipped and Azriel had vanished. They’d worked in silent, perfect tandem.
Not to attack, she realized, as a shadow darker than the ones around it raced for the tunnel across the chamber. But to go get reinforcements.
“No!” Bryce threw out a hand, and light ruptured from her fingers. It slammed into Azriel’s shadows, fracturing the darkness and revealing the warrior beneath. But not enough to stop his sprint—
She needed more power.
The eight-pointed star at her feet glimmered. As if her magic had nudged something within it. Like embers flaring in stirred ashes. What if her star hadn’t been guiding her to the knowledge, but to something … different? Something tangible.
Like calls to like.
To you, in this very stone, Silene had said, I leave the inheritance and the burden that my own mother passed to me.
This place, this Prison and the court it had once been, was Bryce’s inheritance. Hers to command, as Silene had commanded it.
And that memory, of Silene lying next to the Harp in the center of this room, reaching for one of the carvings with a kernel of light forming at her finger …
In this very stone …
Silene had warped her former palace and home into this Prison. She must have imbued some magic in the rock to do it. Must have given over some part of her power to not only change the terrain, but to house the monsters in their cells.
Theia had shown her how to do it. In those last moments with her daughters, Theia had used the Harp to transfer magic from herself into Silene and Helena, to protect them. It had appeared as a star. Had Silene replicated that here?
Was it possible that the Harp, in that moment that Silene reached for it, power at the ready, had been able to transfer her magic to this place?
… I leave the inheritance and the burden that my own mother passed to me.
And precisely as Theia had gifted her own power to Silene … perhaps Silene had in turn left that same power here, to be claimed by a future scion.
One by one, rapid as shooting stars, the thoughts raced through Bryce. More on instinct than anything else, she dropped to her knees and slammed her hand atop the eight-pointed star. Bryce reached with her mind, through layers of rock and earth—and there it was. Slumbering beneath her.