Page 49 of House of Embers (Royal Houses #5)

Chapter Forty-One

The Vault

The vault was empty.

Well, not completely empty, but compared to how Zina had described it, this place was a ghost town. There was gold in chests and jewels on shelves but no magical artifacts, certainly not hundreds of them in a ballroom.

“Gods,” Kerrigan said as she stepped across the hard stone floor. “Bastian cleared the place out.”

Fordham cursed under his breath as he stalked the length of the enormous room. “We need to check everywhere just in case.”

“Do you think he’d take all the magical artifacts and leave the metal crown? It was in the book. Even if he didn’t know what it did, he’d take it.”

“Then he already has it. Would you prefer that?”

“No.”

“Then keep looking.”

Kerrigan moved through the space. It was massive. It must have been made for truly spectacular treasure back in the day. The fact that Bastian had completely emptied it gave her a foreboding feeling.

Alura had been the one to tell them that Bastian was building a magical artifact arsenal.

It was Clover who had located one of the warehouses where it was being kept.

They had assumed it was out of the mountain because keeping all their weapons under a mountain in a magic-suppressive room while planning a war just wasn’t practical.

But Kerrigan had assumed that he hadn’t moved out everything .

She’d been wrong.

They all had.

Bastian was two steps ahead of them, as he had been all along. Kerrigan had been the one to get him access to the vault in the first place. Of course he would seal it all up so she couldn’t get anything from it.

“He knew,” Kerrigan said as Fordham strode back toward her empty-handed. “He must have known.”

“How? Do you think we have a spy?”

“I don’t know who. Dozan is ruthless.”

“He always has been, but we had that slip with Barron,” Fordham reminded her. “Someone in the inner circle knew about our plans.”

“It could have been anyone. Dozan cleaned the place out after that. He only put people he trusted in the House of Shadows, and he has a dozen people in Draco Mountain as well, besides Alura, who did not know this had been cleared out.”

“It could be Audria.”

Kerrigan shot him a look. “Why? Because of Roake?”

He shrugged. “Maybe she does love him.”

“I don’t want to second-guess our allies. Who can we trust if we start doing that?”

“The fact of the matter is that our circle is no longer small,” he said as he rummaged through a chest. “When we got the dragons, it necessitated becoming larger. It could be anyone in Bryonica, Concha, Venatrix, or any number of other houses.” He threw aside the jewels that dumped out of a chest as he kicked over another, letting coins clatter to the ground.

“It could be my own people. It could be the dragons for all we know.”

“We’re too big to be thinking like this.”

Fordham kicked over another chest in anger. “Fine. Let’s just use the crystal to check for the crown and then get out of here.”

Shadows bloomed in Fordham’s hand, and he reached into a pocket of the nothing and grasped a chunk of white crystal the size of his palm.

“Show-off,” she grumbled. She still hadn’t been able to make the Ollivier trick work for her even though Wynter claimed it was easier than jumping.

“Parlor tricks,” Fordham said with a shrug.

When Kerrigan had come back from the plane and told Fordham all that she had learned, he’d realized that they had this crystal in the House of Shadows. He hadn’t even known it was tendrille.

They’d toyed with it for a while to try to get it to work, and after much back-and-forth, they discovered that they could power it with some magic. It didn’t make much sense because tendrille negated magic, but the tendrille at the Holy Mountain held Ferrinix’s memory.

Unlike gray and black tendrille, the white crystal lit up from the inside out, and when it got close to a magical artifact, the crystal would begin to vibrate.

Unfortunately, Kerrigan couldn’t use it while she had her mother’s bracelet on.

So she watched as Fordham concentrated in the oppressive room, digging out a bit of magic that felt like being dunked underwater and trying to breathe.

But a small bit of magic filtered up, and he pressed it into the tendrille, where it glowed and began to vibrate, indicating a magical artifact was nearby.

Kerrigan held her wrist up. “Bracelet.”

“Right,” Fordham said, pointing the crystal elsewhere.

“Take it around the rest of the room, and see if you find anything else.”

Fordham was all the way to the back of the vault when a commotion sounded from the other side of the door. Kerrigan put her ear to it. Had the guards been found? Was it a shift change?

Then she heard it—a clicking noise.

“Quick,” she told Fordham. “They’re opening the vault door.”

“Almost done!” he called back as he continued around the room. “He must have already taken it. It’s only working for your bracelet.”

Kerrigan sighed. “Maybe the crown isn’t here. Maybe it never was.”

Fordham pocketed the crystal as he returned to her side. “Portal us out.”

Kerrigan clicked her mother’s bracelet around her wrist and felt for that place where she could access the portal magic. It was fuzzy around the edges. Still she reached for it, the door sparking to life for a moment before fizzling out.

“What’s happening?” Fordham asked.

She tried again. The portal barely materialized this time, as if she were looking through water at her door. Everything was hazy and shifting irregularly. She knew instinctively that if she stepped through that door, they would cease to exist.

It collapsed in on itself before she could even recall it.

Her last try was even worse than the others. Not only could she barely get a spark of a door to open, but it felt like her magic had drained out of her like sand in a sieve.

“Uh…it isn’t working,” she said.

“But it worked in Ravinia.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the iron. Maybe there’s more tendrille. Maybe it’s deeper. But it isn’t working.”

“Then I’ll jump us, and we’ll run.”

“Okay.” Kerrigan grasped him, shivering from the magic drain. “Let’s go.”

They entered the nothing, shadows closing over their heads, and then they both slammed into the vault door.

Kerrigan dropped to her knees. “Scales.”

Fordham ground his teeth together. “The shield is back up.”

“So we’re trapped?”

“It appears so.”

“What are we going to do?”

This had always been a possibility—a possibility that Dozan had argued most of all.

They’d sat around their inner-circle war council explaining what the metal crown was, what it could do, and where they thought it was.

Everyone had agreed that it was worth it to get it away from Bastian…

except Dozan, who had adamantly argued that it was a trap buried at the bottom of the mountain with the highest chance of capture.

They’d done it anyway, and he’d been right.

“Damn it, Dozan,” she grumbled.

“It’s almost like he knew,” Fordham said.

“Dozan isn’t the mole!”

“I didn’t say he was.”

Kerrigan shot him a glare. “You didn’t have to say it out loud.”

“You trust Dozan. He’s clearly in love with my sister,” Fordham added with a shudder. “But he made the point several times.”

“Yeah, as he tried to warn us not to do it. He’s the spymaster. He gets all the information. And look,” she said, holding her hands out. “He was right.”

“I’ll buy him a cookie,” Fordham muttered.

“Just keep your magic close. I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Was it the crashing into the vault door that gave you the feeling?”

“Shh,” she hissed as the door was pulled open.

The blue edge of a shield was shoved immediately into place, edge-to-edge with the now-open door, blocking them inside. And standing at attention with a contingent of guards was Gerrond.

“Look what we have here,” Gerrond said.

His hands were behind his back as he stepped toward the open door with the shield between them. He had a satisfied look on his face as if he’d just won the big score.

“Well, it’s not Dozan,” Fordham said.

“No shit.” Kerrigan shot him a look. “I’ll let him know you have such faith in him after we’re out of here.”

“Neither of you are going anywhere,” Gerrond said.

Kerrigan sighed. “Well, this is disappointing.”

“That’s not the word I’d use,” Fordham said.

“Your great plans have been thwarted,” Gerrond said.

“Mmm.” She tilted her head. “Is that what you think?”

“I’ve made a deal.”

“Let me guess: us for the drifters?”

Gerrond startled at her words. “Well, yes. Bastian is merciful.”

Kerrigan laughed in a quick burst. “Merciful. Wow. You’re serious.”

“He understands that the drifters have been mistreated,” Gerrond continued with a glare. “It would be easy to fold them into the house system. That way, they don’t have to live on the fringes of society any longer. And I can deliver him the two people he wants most in the world.”

“Yeah. And did you ask the drifters if this was what they wanted? Or even seem to question if the half-Fae and humans among them would want to join the Society?”

“Of course they would.”

Kerrigan nodded. “I’ll take that as a no. Also, you cannot believe anything Bastian has said when it comes to half-Fae or humans. I should know. He fooled me too.”

Gerrond waved her concerns away. “I feel for you and your plight, but the Society is in the right. I never wanted to work with traitors. I just wanted a way to help my people, and you have given me that. So I will thank you, Kerrigan Argon, for your service.”

Her blood started to boil. He was so naive and so deeply flawed.

The fact that she’d believed him—they’d all believed him—hurt her the most. Wynter had read his aura and said that he wasn’t a liar.

He’d been working with Clover all this time.

The drifters, who he claimed to care so much about, were working with her.

And all that had been a bluff for when a better offer was provided.

He didn’t really want to break away from the Society.

He could have done that at any point to work with the drifters.

He could have done anything for them. But no, he wanted to work within the system.

She’d given him the perfect opening for it too.

“Steady,” Fordham said down the bond.

“I’m going to kill him.”

“Breathe.”

She took Fordham’s words to heart and inhaled sharply.

Her eyes followed Gerrond, who had begun pacing like a cat, monologuing about how great he was and how he had tricked them.

She wanted to reach through that shield and strangle him.

He only cared for himself, not even the drifters.

Because that deal was assuredly going to fall apart, and when it did, Gerrond would be in the same spot he’d started in, only that much closer to the top.

“Are you through with this self-aggrandizing bullshit?” Kerrigan asked.

Gerrond stumbled, straightening his jacket quickly. “You’re trapped here now, so you might as well get used to it. The only place you’re going from here is a prison.”

Fordham’s smile was feline and predatory. “Like one could keep us.”

“Strap you in enough iron and it could,” Gerrond boasted.

Kerrigan bristled at the thought of putting Fordham in iron, dampening his magic, hurting her mate. Something shifted at the thought. Something that made her anger hit a peak.

Her magic was weak from trying to use the bracelet unsuccessfully, but there was still a barely there thread of spirit magic. If she used it now, she wouldn’t be able to portal them out of the mountain. It was a risk she had to take.

She narrowed her focus to the center of the shield, ignoring Gerrond’s continued monologue.

He no longer mattered. None of it mattered.

All that mattered was the spirit magic she was currently centering like a sunbeam.

She had practiced it back in the House of Shadows.

Well, on a well-worn mountainside where she couldn’t hurt anyone, but Tieran had mostly laughed at her ineptitude.

She’d either used the blast too effectively, cleaving the cliff, or absolutely nothing happened. She had no skill with it.

Today, she released it like a beam of light. It hit the dead center of the guards’ shields, shattering them into a million little pieces.

The guards scrambled backward in shock, and then Kerrigan and Fordham stepped through the vault door.

“You were saying, Gerrond?” Kerrigan asked.