Then the bodies it had come from.
I went to the nearest slumped corpse. There, on his belt, was a little ring of silver keys.
Considering stabbing a door before I even looked for the keys. Goddess fucking help me. I was grateful Raihn wasn’t here to see this.
With some brief fumbling, I unlocked three of the four locks. It was only on the fourth one that it occurred to me: Why was my room being guarded?
And why was it locked to begin with?
This thought only hit me as I pushed open the door, only to immediately dodge a vanity chair swinging at my head.
“Fuck,” I spat, hitting the ground in just the right way to disturb the worst of my wounds.
“Gods!”
Thump, as the wielder of the weaponized chair let it fall to the ground.
I rolled over, wincing, to see Mische standing over me, her hands covering her mouth, eyes wide. She was still in her gown from the party, though it was now wrinkled, her makeup smeared.
“I am so glad you’re alive!”
She dropped to her knees, looking like she was about to fling her arms around my neck, then went suddenly serious, brow contorted.
“What the hell are you doing here? And why do you smell like that?”
Once Mische’s questions started, they didn’t stop.
“Where’s Raihn?” she asked, as she helped me up. “How did you get in here? Did you see what’s happening outside? Is there an army coming?” And then, again, like the first time wasn’t enough, “Where’s Raihn?”
“We can talk and walk,” I said. “We don’t have much time.”
Though, Goddess, I was happy to see her.
I lowered to grab my sword, which had fallen in Mische’s wild chair attack, and when she saw it, her eyes bulged.
“Is that—”
“Yes.”
“Gods, Oraya. You’ve actually wielded it?”
For some reason, Mische’s disbelief was the thing to make my own set in all at once, a wave that I’d been suppressing for the last two days.
It had been… a very, very strange two days.
“It’s… yes.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I just cleared my throat. “Let’s hurry. Guards might be coming or—”
“There were only those two.”
Mische put aside her shock, her face going serious.
The pendant.
Right. I went to my vanity and yanked open the top drawer.
“Why are you here?” I asked. “Why aren’t you in the dungeons?”
A beat of silence.
“Let’s just go,” she said, going to the door, her back to me. “You said we don’t have time.”
I paused. There was a note to her voice that seemed… odd.
But she was right. We didn’t have time. I rummaged through one drawer of my vanity, then another, my heart rate rising.
It had been in here.
The pendant had been in here.
I was certain of it. I had been very careful about where I put it. I checked on it every night. But in the drawer was only a nest of useless fucking silks.
No pendant.
Not even a hint of its magic.
“Goddess fucking damn it,” I muttered.
“What?” Mische asked.
“Did someone come in here?”
I ripped open another drawer, just in case I was wrong, even though I knew I wasn’t.
“Before me? I’ve only been here for a day. It took a few hours for them to—”
I slammed the drawer shut, hissing a curse.
They’d found it, then. They’d searched this room. Of course they had. Septimus was a prick, but he wasn’t stupid.
It was gone. If it was in this room, I’d feel it.
I didn’t have time to think about what that meant. Not when, with every passing second, Raihn could be having his ass handed to him down in that dungeon.
I returned to Mische, who stared at me with a wrinkle between her brows. She had questions, I knew, but like me, she knew now was not the time to ask them. She went to one of the Rishan corpses and grabbed the sword from his still-rigid hand.
I’d fought alongside Mische several times now. But it still seemed a little strange every time I saw her with a weapon, mostly because she was so competent with them, and that seemed at odds with a personality like hers.
The two of us crept down the hall, moving swiftly and silently along the walls.
We just needed to get back to the tunnel and get back down to Raihn before— It was the worst luck.
Horrifically, hilariously terrible luck.
A figure arrived at the top of the stairs at the exact same moment that we rounded the corner. We had no time to hear his steps and backtrack.