Page 66 of Crown of the Dunes (The Ballan Desert #2)

At that moment, both a knock sounded on the door as well as a scuffling on the balcony.

Both of us jumped to our feet. In a matter of seconds, the door swung open to reveal Neven with a bolt of sapphire silk over his arm.

At the same time, Erix swung over the railing, landing impossibly lightly on the balcony, despite his muscular bulk.

We all froze, and I looked between all of them with wide eyes.

Aderyn and Erix appeared to be on speaking terms these days, but I was not sure how much of that was aided by being able to beat on each other with blunt weapons.

I would trust all three of the people in this room with my life, but I wasn’t sure how much they might trust each other.

Neven broke the silence. “Aderyn, you didn’t tell me it was a party. I would have brought laka .”

Some of the tension rushed from the room, and Neven shut the door behind him. He and Aderyn began sorting the paper strewn across my bed into piles, but I stood frozen. Erix hovered on the balcony, and as I met his gaze, I saw the hard truth written there.

He knew. Deep in his bones he knew that I was about to agree to marry somebody else. I wanted to find anger in those silver eyes—for him to match my rage at the situation, so hot I thought I could melt the very stone around us.

But instead, his silver eyes were a steely gray. His mask may have lain on the table across the room, but his face was just as hard and expressionless.

“It’s good to see you again,” Neven said over my shoulder.

Erix’s gaze snapped away from mine, and finally he stepped through the archway to the balcony and into the room .

I raised my brows, looking between the two of them.

I hadn’t known they had met, but Erix just shrugged.

Neven turned to set the pile of scrolls in his hands on the trunk at the foot of my bed, but his gaze caught on the sheaf of papers already there.

On the top was a piece that Erix and I had both pored over the past few nights, trying to puzzle out what it might be.

Neven picked up the ripped page of Kelvar’s diary and squinted at the angular handwriting.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Erix hesitated, but Aderyn cut in, “He knows about the blood glass and the Heart.”

“It’s barely worth keeping it a secret anymore, considering we can’t figure out how to get to it anyway. It’s hard to worry about people wanting to steal it for their own power when it doesn’t seem possible to steal it at all,” I muttered.

Erix strode up to Neven and took the paper from his hand. He stared at it with such intensity that I was unsure if he was trying to decipher its meaning or set it on fire.

“Kelvar says we need a substance ‘born of the desert’s rage’, but that is frighteningly vague,” he admitted, a rumble of frustration clear in his tone.

Neven hummed in thought and sat down on my bed next to Aderyn. His gaze caught on the metal mask sitting on the nearby table, and he reached out to it.

I hissed in a breath through my teeth as he picked it up, something about the action feeling like it must be horribly invasive for Erix. The noise made Erix look up from the paper before him, but when he caught sight of Neven turning over the mask in his hands, he only frowned slightly.

“What kind of metal is this made out of?” Neven asked. “I thought it looked like steel, but it seems too light. And too strong.”

“Oh.” Erix’s eyes went wide, as if nobody had ever asked him such a thing.

I certainly hadn’t, spending most of my questions on why he wore it.

“It is steel, but Lord Alasdar knew ways of crafting things to imbue them with the magic of the desert. I guess I know how he learned now.” He glanced down at the stolen pages of Kelvar’s journal, and his lips twisted in a scowl.

“That mask was tempered with my own blood. The process made it remarkably durable, and resistant to both heat and cold.”

My breath caught at his casual mention of another one of Lord Alasdar’s cruelties—bleeding Erix to make the device of his torture nearly indestructible. Aderyn too blanched where she stood next to Neven, making the black line on her head stand out even more starkly.

Neven’s eyebrows just climbed higher on his forehead. His long, nimble fingers traced the jagged groove now gouged into the face. “But this… this damage was done by the tricrith’s venom?”

“Yes,” Erix answered. “It’s the first thing to ever…”

My eyes widened at the same moment his did, and our gazes locked across the room.

Neven vocalized my racing thoughts, a few beats ahead of me in logic. “This material was strengthened by blood, but the venom could undo it. The tricrith is a creature of legend.”

“Born of the desert’s fury,” Erix finished.

“The tricrith from the funeral—”

“We burned it,” Aderyn cut me off, sounding glum.

Some of the excited energy drained from the room. My shoulders slumped at the sudden loss of momentum—another dead end in our search.

“I can find another,” Erix said, his jaw tight and a dark glimmer of determination in his eyes. “We just need to be sure the venom is truly what we need.”

“How are we supposed to test that?” I asked.

Erix’s brow furrowed. Then he turned on his heel and stalked from the room without a single word.

The three of us left exchanged confused looks.

Then, we hurried after him. By the time I pushed through the door from my bedroom, Erix was already halfway up the flight of spiraling stairs to the library and Alyx’s tomb beyond.

We trailed him into the library where he immediately began shuffling through scrolls and books.

“There is a bestiary in here that describes many of the creatures from before the desert was crossed. I remember being fascinated with it as a child,” he explained.

With a triumphant grunt, he held up a thick tome, bound in green leather and embossed with gold letters.

He laid it on the table and began flipping through it.

I drifted closer to look over his shoulder, only to see that the binding was not in fact leather, but snakeskin. A small shudder danced up my spine, but Erix didn’t seem concerned. He jabbed a finger at the page before him.

“There,” he said triumphantly. “This is how I knew what the tricrith and the gravehawk were.”

Aderyn and Neven hovered over his other shoulder and read from the page. “Any who are injected with the tricrith’s venom die a horrible death, as their blood is boiled inside their veins. It destroys all blood on contact and is the only substance known in the Ballan Desert to weaken blood glass.”

“ Sands ,” I breathed. “We found it.”

Erix looked up from the bestiary and met my gaze.

The storm clouds that had gathered in my mind since hearing that the crops had died seemed slightly further away.

If the Heart was restored, the herds would return, and crops would flourish again.

The people of Kelvadan would be saved from starvation, even without Viltov’s grain.

The flinty hardness in Erix’s eyes put a stopper on the spring of hope bubbling inside me.

“The trouble will be getting our hands on it,” he said.

My heart plummeted, as we all stood in apprehensive silence.

I sighed heavily. “I suppose it’s time we hunted another desert horror.”

The moonlight shone off Erix’s curls as he stood on the balcony with his back to me.

Aderyn and Neven had headed home for the night, leaving the two of us alone.

The breeze drifting in through the arched opening to where I sat on my bed was gentle and cool.

It would be easily mistaken for a pleasant evening, if not for the tense set of Erix’s shoulder and the waves of barely contained anger rushing down the bond between us .

It felt like the time his temper had nearly caused me to wound Aderyn with a training saber, wresting my own magic from my control, but amplified.

Usually, reaching out to touch him would calm the storm dancing under his skin—it had stopped a sandstorm in its tracks when we traveled the desert—but tonight I feared it would make things worse.

“We did— You did everything you could,” I murmured. It seemed like an empty sentiment, but it was true. For the past two weeks, Erix had barely made it onto my balcony before collapsing headfirst on the bed in exhaustion.

“And somehow, it only managed to make everything worse,” Erix said, not looking at me.

His tone was heavy and dangerous—as sharp as the saber he cared for every night.

“Just like everything I’ve ever tried to accomplish.

When I pledged myself to saving this desert, I became a weapon for a mad man.

Even now the clans I helped him conquer threaten war against the ones I swore to serve.

I am a weapon, made only to hurt, and I only cut deeper when I try to help. ”

I pushed to my feet and walked up behind him.

He didn’t turn, but I wrapped my arms around him and rested my forehead between his shoulder blades.

A shudder ran through him, so small that I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been pressed against him, and I breathed in his salt and sandalwood scent.

The dust that clung to his clothes mixed with it in an earthy, comforting combination.

“If we restore the Heart, the famine will abate,” I spoke into his back, but a rumble in his chest told me he heard me. “We’re so close to getting it. If the herds of oryx come back and we can make peace with the clans, the riders will be able to hunt for enough meat to make up for the lost grain.”

Erix sighed, his ribs expanding and contracting under my forehead. “Remember when I first arrived in Kelvadan, and I told you how Zephyr never seemed to make it to you with my letters?”

I nodded.

“It felt like the desert was trying to keep us apart. Like she didn’t want me to get to you. Maybe this is why. Because to save her people you would have to choose somebody else. ”

My heart twisted painfully. I yearned to tell him that I did choose him, but the words stuck.

“We can figure something out,” I insisted, but the words seemed weak to my own ears. “We already keep what is between us hidden. If this marriage to Prince Calix really is just an alliance, perhaps nothing has to change. Or maybe I can find another way. Put him off a little longer.”

Erix twisted to face me, but a scream cut through the peaceful evening air. I froze, eyes widening as another shout drifted up from the city below. I untangled myself from Erix and ran toward the door.

He was hot on my heels as I bounded down the spiral staircase so fast I became dizzy.

My feet were bare on the warm stone and my loose hair whipped behind me, but I paid it no mind as I raced through the palace and toward the gates.

Maybe Izumi and her clans had come to besiege us once more—the scream had come from nearby, meaning they were likely already inside the city walls.

I sprinted through the courtyard, past the statue of Kelvar to the gate. The riders stationed there shouted after me, but I paid them no mind, running toward the noise of the commotion. I swung around a corner and careened headlong into another man.

He stumbled back, falling down. A pained grunt escaped him as he didn’t use his hands to break his fall, instead clutching desperately to a small basket cradled in his arms. I moved to apologize for knocking him down, when my blood chilled in horror.

He was splattered in blood, but he did not appear to be injured. A bloody knife hung haphazardly from his belt.

“There he is!”

A group of three riders crashed around the corner, charging toward where I stood above the man at the end of the street. They descended on us, hauling the man to his feet by his armpits while one of the guards disarmed him.

“What happened?” I demanded of them.

One of them swung on me as if to say it was none of my business, only to look shocked to find his queen standing in the middle of the street. His eyes flicked down, and he momentarily seemed confused as to my lack of shoes or proper clothes, but he dragged his gaze back to my face.

“This man broke into a family’s home and then killed the woman who tried to stop him,” the rider announced. He turned to the thief. “Let’s see what it is you were trying to steal.”

The rider reached for the basket still clutched in the blood-stained man’s hands.

He tried to wrench it free, but the thief held fast, and a struggle ensued.

With a shredding sound, the lid of the basket ripped free, and the contents spilled to the ground: two loaves of bread and a handful of dates.

My throat burned and my skin crawled.

“I was just trying to feed my children,” the man spat, looking down at the meager food now scattered on the stone street.

I stumbled back, straight into Erix’s chest as he stood behind me. My gaze flicked back and forth between the blood splattered across the thief’s face and the bread on the ground. I shook my head in despair.

Behind me, Erix said what I had already known deep down in my bones.

“There is no more time to wait. You have to accept Prince Calix.”