The gate rattled with Elene’s violent application of her boot. “Papa refuses to come here with me or listen to what I say, because my showing him would break my oath and because the secret’s owner is holy Caedmon’s heir. I’d hoped one of the monks might listen, but I was never allowed to be alone with them. And I could never tell anyone outside the cabal. All I want is to stop this wickedness. And so this morning, seeing how you sensed his evil already—rightly so—and I was so angry, I said I’d bring you. Yet I would send you away ignorant even now if he’d not told you he was going to the Danae right away. He means to do this…to use their magic…”
She grasped the iron hasp, touched it with a gold ring that shot sparks like fireflies into the dark, and spoke a word I could not decipher for the half growl, half sob that accompanied it.
“Mistress, you must excuse my confusion. Who is going to do what? Osriel?”
Indeed, I thought my acuity must be impaired again, so little sense could I make of all this. The most daunting news I’d gleaned from her avalanche of words was that her fear outstripped her anger.
The breach in the rocks proved to be but a crumbling wash the width of my armspan. It rose at a shallow pitch, which my lungs approved, and wound between huge boulders that were easy to spot—a good thing, as the sky was as dark as tar. I wasn’t sure how Elene could show me anything. Yet when we emerged from the gully atop the ridge, a livid haze lit the night before us, illuminating a scene of desolation.
For as far as I could see, the ridge top had been hacked away, gouged and broken into a shallow bowl a quellé wide, at least, seamed with trenches and pocked with dark holes. Broken troughs and sluices, iron wheels, and snarls of ancient rope rotted or rusted amid heaps of crushed rock. Chiseled slabs lay tilted and broken beside a monstrous quern and a cracked mortar broader than my armspan.
But it was not the ugly spoil heaps or grinding stones that colored my soul the same bruised gray as the unnatural haze and made me want to run far from this place. All the grief of Evanore lay here. All the anger. The pent emotions I had felt on the wind, and those I had sensed when first I looked upon Osriel’s land, were but goosedown to the leaden weight of sorrow and fury that settled on my spirit. I could scarce breathe.
“What gold could be dug from Dashon Ra has been long carted away,” said Elene, standing at my shoulder. “But he says the veins yet thread the earth like a web and extend throughout Evanore. He says they are like ring mail that strengthens our land, holding a power that fires magic. Come on.”
She marched down the sloping side of the abandoned mine, hopped across a deep, narrow trench, and skirted the corner of a rubble wall—all that remained of a shed. The haze thickened, coiling violet tendrils about Elene’s boots. I followed, wishing I had never asked her to show me this. Making Deunor’s sign upon my brow and drawing Iero’s holy seal upon my breast, I prayed that Saverian’s spell would not fail me. This land held terrible secrets.
Down and down. Our boots slipped and slid on the loose tailings and patches of ice. Nearing the bottom of the slope, we ducked under an ancient leat, solid and unbroken, though only grit and gravel remained where water had once flowed. Beyond us lay the lowermost levels of the mine, a rectangular pit of iron-laced rock the size of Renna’s Great Hall, cracked and scarred by weather and men’s work. Piles of rubble littered its floor. And across every handsbreadth of the rock walls, every protrusion, knob, or broken shelf held a vessel of carved stone, votive vessels as you would find in Deunor’s temple or Iero’s cathedral—hundreds of them, some the size of bread loaves or tabors, some smaller, palm-sized like oil lamps, like the calyx I had seen in Osriel’s bloody hands in the abbey kitchen.
The bruised haze hung above the vessels as does the stench above a midden. Dread rose in my soul like fever. “This is where he brings them…the eyes of the dead.”
“He seals each vessel with his own blood. When he brings it here, he unseals it and empties it into the earth. That dark blotch at the center is a bottomless shaft. Though the vessels are no longer needed, he names them sacred because of what they carried, so he leaves them here.”
“Not sacred,” I said, revulsion clogging my throat. “This is no holy place. No temple. It is a prison.” As my gaze roamed the desolation, I clamped my hands under my arms as if some accident might make them touch this violated earth. I didn’t want to hear those trapped here. I didn’t want to feel their fury and confusion and hatred more clearly than I did already. Madness had owned me for too many days.
Elene scooped up a handful of crushed stone and dirt, then allowed it to rain through her fingers onto the dry earth. “He plans to work some terrible magic here. When he brought me here three years ago to show me—to end what we had begun in happier times—he said he hoped with all his being that he would never have to set his plan in motion, for it would be such a sin as would end his last hope of heaven. Truly, Brother Valen, it is not for his own glory, but for Navronne he strives, yet he does not listen that hope cannot be bought with sin.”
The bilious light sapped all color from her warm skin. The tears rolled down her cheeks like gray pearls, and her palms pressed flat across her belly as if to shield the child that grew inside her. “I put my hope in Luviar and his noble lighthouse to show him the way of right. For one blessed hour on that same night you escaped from Gillarine, I thought his loneliness had led him back to love. And though that hope proved false, I believed my dearest prayers answered when he told us of the Harrower hiding place you’d found, and that his brothers had agreed to join him to oppose Sila Diaglou. But a tenday ago, while you lay ill, reports came that Sila Diaglou had abandoned her hidden fortress and, at the same time, raised her own banner in Palinur alongside his brother’s. A light went out of him that day. Within hours he left Renna with only Voushanti accompanying him. And since he’s come back, he has not spoken to me, not looked at me, not told anyone where he went. I’ve begged him, yelled at him, pleaded with him to explain to the cabal what he plans next, but he refuses.”
She waved her hand at the bleak scene before us. “Three years ago, he told me that his own power might not be enough to accomplish what he wants, and that the more certain way would be to ask the Danae’s help to join their magic to his. And now you are to take him to the Danae. Whatever this is…he’s decided to go through with it. By the Holy Mother, Valen, you’re a sorcerer and his friend—the only one not blinded by fealty or awe or fear. Only you can stop him…save him.”
I wanted to laugh at the idea of me stopping Osriel the Bastard, the rightful King of Navronne, the sorcerer who called up red lightning and performed rites that reeked of brimstone, from doing anything he chose. But Elene’s grief and fear for the prince tempered my answer with sobriety, at least. “Lady, I cannot even begin to imagine what spells might be worked with…whatever lies in this place. And indeed the prince has good reasons to go to the Danae, the same he has stated all along. We must know what they can tell us of the world’s sickness and its remedy. If he gives them warning of Sila Diaglou and Gildas, perhaps they will shelter our Scholar and give light to his lighthouse. It is his right and his duty to speak to them for us. But I promise you I’ll do what I can to discover his plans and persuade him to some alternative.”
I had no faith in my promise. Nor did she, though she thanked me and pretended it so. I took her in my arms as she wept, wishing naught but to offer comfort. For indeed the least significant, yet most painful discovery on this night of dread revelation was that I would willingly suffer any danger to serve Elene, though her heart was not—and had never been—mine to win. No wonder at her agonies if that ebullient heart—and the child she had conceived—belonged to the Duc of Evanore. And no matter the course of past or future, a love already tested by the trials of grim necessity, of denial and sacrifice, of illness, war, and unholy sorcery, was unlikely to be swayed by the fingers of a feckless vagabond, whatever the marvels of his birth.