My fingers tightened, nails biting my palm.
“We don’t have time to chip away at this,” I said. “If he was as easy as Tarkan—”
Atrius’s seriousness broke for a moment, a smirk twitching at the corner of his mouth. “You look murderous.”
I scoffed. I felt murderous. “It’s a shame that all problems can’t be solved by cutting off a head.”
Atrius went very still.
My brows furrowed. “What?”
“Mm.”
That little non-answer, absentminded, his eyes distant, told me it was not nothing. And then, slowly, that smirk returned, this time clinging stubbornly to the corner of his mouth. A now-familiar smug sensation rolled from his presence.
I sat up straighter.
“What an ominous silence,” I said.
“Mm,” Atrius replied, unhelpfully.
“You have an idea.”
I didn’t mean for the hint of admiration—Weaver help me, maybe even excitement—to creep into my voice.
“It’s not an idea yet.”
Yet.
I arched my brows, silently commanding, Tell me.
“Maybe you’ve inspired me,” he said. “You taught me the value of severing the snake.”
“And this snake is the Pythora King’s head?”
“If it was, would it work?”
I paused, considering this.
The warlords were installed by the Pythora King, but they were self-serving and weak on their own. I doubted the handful that remained in power would be able to put up much of a fight if the Pythora King was gone, nor especially inclined to sacrifice themselves for a king too dead to impress.
“Yes,” I said. “But how would we do that?”
The Pythora King wasn’t like Tarkan, residing in a castle in the center of a bustling city. He was incredibly isolated, his palace surrounded by mountains.
Atrius reached into a pile of papers in a box and withdraw a beaten-up roll of parchment, which he unrolled over the ground—a map of Glaea.
“You’re the local guide,” he said. “You tell me. Give me a way to reach the Pythora King without fighting my way through three more warlords.”
He said it so simply. Like it was just a given that such a thing existed. Like it was a given that I had the answer. And his threads were steady—no doubt, no question.
A bittersweet sensation tightened in my chest, as it hit me just how much Atrius genuinely believed in me.
I leaned over the map, running my fingers over the lines of raised ink. Seeing through the threads sometimes made it slow to interpret ink on paper, but I knew the layout of my homeland so well, I barely needed the map anyway. My fingertips traced our location, running north—first by the western path, through Karisine and Ralan. Then they drifted west—to the bumpy, violent slashes of ink that represented the Zadra Cliffs, an expansive maze of rocky mountains that ran all the way up to the northern shore. On the far eastern side of them, hidden well within the treacherous cliffs, the Salt Keep stood.
The Pythora King had chosen to build his castle just beyond the Zadra Cliffs because they were the ultimate protection. No soul could get through them. What paths did run between them were narrow and treacherous, and overrun with slyviks—giant reptilian beasts, the kind of creature children invented in nightmares. Worse, those roads were impossible to navigate, both because of their directionless winding and because heavy mists destroyed all visibility.
Yet, my finger lingered there over those mountains.
I could feel Atrius’s aura growing more smug.
“The paths there could take us to the Pythora King,” he said.
Always statements, never questions.
“Maybe. But they’re impassible.”
But even as the words left my lips, I wasn’t sure that was true. History was full of stories of armies who had attempted to cross the cliffs and failed, damning themselves.
Human armies.
“You don’t believe that,” Atrius said.
I straightened, taking him in. The smirk now permanently curled his mouth, the pleasure echoed in his soul. Despite everything against us now, I had to admit to myself I did enjoy witnessing him this way.
“Vampires are hardier than humans,” I said. “It will be a difficult journey, but your warriors can endure it far better than humans. The hard part will be navigating.”
That was the real killer. Theoretically, one could get through the pass in a few weeks or less, if moving fast. The problem was that no one was ever moving fast, because it was impossible to tell where you were going.