Page 54

As he spoke, he’d been leading us through a series of quiet brick passages, accessed through a bookshelf behind his desk that swung away from the wall. He ducked at last through a stone archway and flung out his arm dramatically.

There, on a plain wooden table in a cramped stone room, its only companion a single flickering lamp, sat the Three-Eyed Crown.

And it wasmoving.

Talan flinched at the sight. The glamour he’d woven vanished in an instant, revealing his true, ashen face. Gemma grabbed his hand and stepped a little in front of him. Ryder strode right toward the thing and leaned down to inspect it, and I followed him cautiously, transfixed despite my fear—and despite the hook of curiosity that had lodged in me the previous day. I refused to look at Ryder—his broad back, his muscled shoulders, his dark hair. Ryder, the shining boy? I had very nearly convinced myself that it was impossible. The son of my enemy, still young and rash with boyhood, having a heroic change of heart the very night his family tried to murder us? Absurd, laughable. A flowery fantasy pulled out of one of Gemma’s romantic novels. And yet vestiges of the idea lingered, annoyingly. I imagined batting them aside like a cloud of gnats and focused my attention back on the crown.

It was as if some mechanism buried within it had activated and pieces of it had unfolded, distorting its shape and exposing its inner workings. It hummed quietly as it moved through a cycle. First the crown’s band split open along its carvings into ten different squares. They popped out randomly until the whole circumference was brokeninto pieces. They remained that way while the great metal shards that thrust up from the band, a parody of royal splendor, sprung outward one by one, expanding, lethal, like a series of traps to catch small animals. The three amber gems embedded in the band spun wildly in their prongs. Then the crown reassembled itself piece by piece until it sat quietly on the table, its familiar horrid self once more. And then, after a moment, the cycle began again.

“Fascinating,” Ryder murmured.

“Isn’t it?” Gareth was practically bursting. “I don’t know what triggered this behavior, but it’s been going on for two days. I’m inclined to be grateful. It’s much easier to study its inner workings when they’re literally presenting themselves for inspection.”

Talan approached the crown, stone-faced, deathly pale. “I don’t sense Kilraith here. If he were manipulating the crown, I would know.” He paused, then shook his head. “It’s not pulling at me either. I don’t feel drawn to it more than any of you probably do. I can regard it coldly.” His expression darkened. “Or coldly enough, anyway.”

“No, I agree that whatever force is behind this doesn’t seem malevolent,” Gareth said. “Nor does it seem benevolent. It justis. Some sort of mechanical malfunction.”

“It’s revolting,” Gemma murmured, staring at it with an expression of utter hatred.

I agreed with her sentiment. I took a step back from the awful thing. Its very design, all those sharp edges and grinning carvings, was one of cruelty. “And you say you’ve been able to study it more easily?”

“Indeed,” said Gareth. “When it’s fully intact, the crown is difficult to inspect with even the most aggressive uncloaking spellwork—and of course it would, as a defensive measure—but when it opens up, it’s far less resistant to examination.”

“Spellwork?” I threw him a suspicious look. “But you’re no beguiler.”

He winced a little. “No, but Heldine is.”

Ryder straightened up to glare at Gareth. “You allowed your assistant to see the crown?”

“I was getting nowhere on my own. Or I suppose I was gettingsomewhere, but far too slowly. I’m an Anointed sage. My power is limited to intellect and memory—which,” he added, with a roguish sort of grin, “are no small things, mind you.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose.“Gareth.”

“But, my astonishing brain notwithstanding, I can only observe so much without the assistance of other kinds of magic. That’s the wonderful thing about working at a university—professors and students with specific talents all collected in one place and books everywhere you look. We learn best by working together, but Ican’twork with my colleagues as I normally would, not on something so sensitive. I can, however, work with Heldine. There’s a reason I hired a beguiler as my assistant. The stodgier of my peers thought I was mad. Only sages will do, in their opinion. So many of them are narrow-minded snobs.”

“And you trust this person?” Ryder said, a bit of a growl in his voice.

“With my life,” Gareth replied at once. “She’s a paragon of discretion, and you wouldn’t know it by looking at her, but her spellcraft is sharp as daggers.”

Ryder grunted. “A clumsy metaphor. If not properly maintained, a dagger can in fact go quite dull.”

Gareth waved his hand. “You know what I mean. The point is, she’s a vault. She won’t tell anyone a thing. And together—my translation of these arcane carvings on the crown’s surface, her investigative spellwork—we think we’ve landed upon something very exciting.”

He rifled through a stack of papers on the floor and then, with a flourish, presented a particularly long one, marked from top to bottom with indecipherable scribbles.

We stared at it, bewildered. In the silence, the crown began another cycle, unfolding itself sharply, humming quietly on the table.

“Gareth,” Gemma said, clearly annoyed, “that means nothing to us. It’s gibberish.”

“No,” Talan said quietly. “It’s not.” He took a step toward the paper, then glanced at Gareth. “May I?”

“Of course,” Gareth said, handing it to him.

Talan squinted at the paper for a long moment. “I don’t understand all of this. Your handwriting’s atrocious.”

Gareth nodded, sheepish. “It just takes too much time to write neatly, I find.”

“And I’m unfamiliar with some of these languages.”