Page 51

T he meal ends without much more in the way of conversation, and we’re returned to our rooms, all of us hungry enough despite all the food and drink we consumed to raid Miriam’s rations another time.

Shortly afterward, our entire party retires to their bedchambers—even Tennet and Fortiss—and I content myself with perching on the edge of my bed, waiting for Fortiss’s signal.

After what seems like several weeks but is probably only an hour or so, I hear a small, huffing chirp from the main chamber. A moment later, a hummerlet pokes her head around the edge of my still-open door and fluffs her feathers at me.

I scramble off the bed and follow her to where Fortiss is waiting at the entry door of our rooms. He doesn’t need to remind me to be silent, but when I look around questioningly, and mouth Tennet’s name, he shakes his head. Then he presses his palms together and mimics Tennet sleeping peacefully.

I blink, and my face must clearly transmit my surprise, because Fortiss grins—grins!

Not an expression I’m used to seeing on his stern, careful face.

Then he reaches for my hand. I take his, and he pulls me close—so close I can feel the measured cadence of his heart, so slow and steady when mine feels like a bunch of cats trapped in a bag.

For a long moment, he merely stares at me, his golden eyes searching mine.

Then a smile flickers across his face. “We must be quiet and fast,” he murmurs, and his fingers close mine, holding them tight in an iron grip. “That’s not really Tennet’s skill set.”

My eyes go wide—Fortiss spelled Tennet to sleep somehow? Drugged him? Or just told him to stand down? Somehow, I can’t see Tennet accepting this last idea, and curiosity burns through me. “But how?” I mouth, only to see Fortiss’s grin deepen.

He leans in closer still, so close his mouth brushes mine, and when he speaks, I feel the tremor of his moving lips, twisting my stomach into knots.

“He was very tired,” he whispers, the words like a fluttering kiss.

I stand rooted in place, my eyes locked on his as he leans back again, and in that moment, I know—he was—is—fully aware of the kiss I shared with Tennet, fully willing to accept it…

And fully willing to fight for me, even on the cusp of a clandestine mission through the halls of the Eighth House.

“Fortiss,” I begin, but he lifts a finger to caress the lips he’d just almost kissed, trailing them with an unexpectedly sensual swipe. His grin has softened now to a look of tender, almost fierce longing.

“Talia.” The word is firm and certain, but he says nothing more…and when he turns my still-linked hand in his and drops a soft, burning kiss to the inside of my wrist that sends my pulse into a frantic thrumming, I find I’ve completely lost the ability to speak.

Straightening and shooting me another quick grin, Fortiss releases his hold on me and turns toward the door. He pulls it wide, the movement quick and sure, as if it’s perfectly natural for him to want to wander around his host’s holding in the middle of the night.

I gape at him for only a second, wondering what story he has for the guards that are surely stationed outside—but there’s no murmur of surprise from the hallway, no shuffling of feat.

Instead, Fortiss steps out, gestures me forward, and immediately sets off down the long, silent hallway.

I hurry to join him, matching his long strides and peering around wildly as a pair of hummerlets bounce along behind us.

I long for him to hold my hand again, which is the height of stupidity, so I content myself with tightening both hands into fists.

“Um…where’d all the guards go?” I finally manage.

“No idea,” Fortiss says, his voice low enough that I wonder if I actually hear him or if he’s speaking in my mind. How did he manage to lull Tennet to sleep, after all? “Do you remember the faces of the ones at dinner? They kind of blended together to me.”

I think back, but I don’t have much luck either.

“Not really. Nobody said a word except Daggar, I don’t think.

” I hesitate, but I’ve been running over Daggar’s conversation in my mind almost constantly since dinner and keep tripping on one line.

“Remember what he said about the delegation calling for help, and the Divhs showed up? He said ‘they put on the garb of the ancients.’”

“I caught that,” he nods, peering down a corridor, then moving on. “That’s got to be the winged crown. There couldn’t have been anything left in those ruins but stone and metal.”

“Yeah, but—who’s ‘they’?”

Fortiss scoffs a laugh. “Just Mirador, I’d bet. In Daggar’s mind, he may as well have been the right hand of the Light.”

He squints down another hallway as we come to an intersection. “We’re close. He said the vault was…this way, I think.”

Fortiss breaks off into distracted mumbling as he leads me along the corridors, and I find their lingering gloom disconcerting. It’s because there are no windows, I decide. There’s only the occasional lit sconce.

In truth, the only sense of time I have since we came to the Eighth House is that I watched the darkness creep across the wide plains as the sun set behind us—and behind the mountains—hours earlier.

After having watched the sun set in the west for so long, it seems almost unreasonable to not have a vantage point to watch it slip over the horizon.

I console myself with the idea that sunrise must be glorious here, but it somehow doesn’t feel the same…

mostly because there’s somewhere I could always go near the Tenth House to watch the sun rise and set.

As flush as the Eighth House is against the mountains, I suspect that most rooms in this manor have never seen the sun.

It’s one of the most impregnable fortresses I’ve ever walked through.

Apparently, however, Lord Daggar’s concern over ensuring the Protectorate’s safety doesn’t extend to keeping an eye on his guests at night. The corridors are eerily empty as we move deeper into the keep.

“Turn here,” Fortiss whispers, and his hand touches my elbow, then holds it as he steers me down another corridor.

The sconces are still lit here, but they’re nearly guttered out, and I wonder how the staff will be able to see to relight them if they all go out at once. Though maybe they’ll carry a torch?

These thoughts swirl around in my head long enough to carry us through two more turns and down a long corridor that terminates at a closed door. No one guards this one, either.

“Hmm.” Fortiss huffs out a breath as he reaches out and touches the handle. The door opens easily. “Not locked.”

“Trap?”

He steps inside the door and draws me in, waiting until our hummerlet escort enters as well before he closes it shut.

The room plunges into full darkness, and he waits another ten full breaths before I hear him rustling in his pockets.

I expect to hear a flint strike signaling him working up a flame to light one of the torches that must line this room…

but instead I hear his low, quiet voice ease out in the darkness.

“Shine bright, little ones,” he murmurs. “Show the way.”

A chirruping sigh is accompanied by a sudden, quickly brightening glow, so unexpected I have to avert my eyes to keep them from being seared into blindness.

“Softly, softly,” Fortiss continues, and I look up to see him grinning from ear to ear, one of Kreya’s hummerlets now perches on his shoulder, looking half asleep as her head nods down over her softly glowing belly. Another equally glowing one rests on a nearby table.

“What are you doing? What’s wrong with fire?” I hiss at him, my eyes going wide as I get used to the illumination. “And how did you make them do that?”

“I asked.” He grins, gesturing at the long-guttered torches.

“I didn’t want to risk leaving a trace that we were here, and after Nazar told me about what he saw the hummerlet do in the forest, I decided we might need them.

They certainly don’t seem interested in returning to Kreya in the Blessed Plane.

Miriam had three hummerlets hanging from her curtains all afternoon, and another one snuck into her cape on the way to dinner. ”

Now it’s my turn to grin. “I thought I heard that.” Then I swivel around, trying to pick out the details of the room. “I still can’t understand how he’d leave this room open if the crown and talonstones were here.”

“Not the crown, I think.” Fortiss shakes his head. “If it still exists, it would almost have to be guarded. But these…” He leads me over to a wall where a heavy chest sits, its lid propped open. I stare at what’s inside.

“But…how can they just be sitting here?”

“Because Daggar doesn’t fully realize what they can do, that’s how,” Fortiss says.

He scoops his hand into the box and comes up with a handful of polished stones, each of them shaped like curved talons.

“Think of how many decorations we have in the First House that look exactly like this. Made out of every type of stone and metal imaginable. They’re everywhere . ”

“Well, they don’t look like these,” I say, holding one up to the hummerlet’s belly. It glints in the light, deep blue shot through with gold. “I don’t even know what this stone is.”

“Daggar told me that the Imperial delegation hauled thousands of these across the open plains on their way west, to the point where they stopped even collecting them, there were so many. After your vision, their purpose makes so much more sense.” He grimaces.

“I’ve seen these at the coliseum too—and you can bet they’re in some of the oldest houses in Trilion.

Nowhere near as beautiful as these, but they clearly got the job done. ”