Page 45 of Thorn Season (Thorn Season #1)

If the copycats had chosen this xerylite mine as a delivery point, they might be storing their weapons here. At the very least, I could relieve them of their armory.

But in an even better scenario, I would find here a piece of evidence that would lead me right to the keeper.

“Here.” I stopped at a boulder propped against a dip in the field, where the grass had been stamped out. “It’s been moved recently.”

I heaved the boulder away with my specter. Just like the tunnels where Keil’s Wielders had taken me, a mesh of foliage concealed the dark entry.

I crouched, and Tari grasped my shoulder.

“We’re only looking,” she said. “If we find anything, we’ll come back with reinforcements.”

I nodded, though I hadn’t a clue what reinforcements Tari was depending on. Vereen was hardly known for its military, and our meager forces were spent guarding the square.

Whatever we found tonight, I would deal with myself.

We descended via a string ladder and landed in a cocoon of warm, damp earth. The ground spread unevenly, soil grinding under my boots. A crackle—then Tari’s face flickered with torchlight. She tossed her match aside as I lifted the torch from its rusty holder.

This complex appeared cruder than the last, the air staler, with open entryways gutting the walls.

“It looks empty,” Tari said.

“Maybe it is.” I couldn’t hide my disappointment.

We slunk forward, our shadows wavering.

“If anyone’s here,” said Tari, “that torch will draw them like a beacon.”

“And if they don’t see us, they’ll hear us,” I retorted.

Her mouth snapped shut.

We continued for several minutes, our breaths heavy in the stillness. With each turning that produced another stretch of unlit torches, my heart sank lower into my stomach. This couldn’t be where my search ended.

Then Tari nudged me, nodding to her left.

A wooden door stood between the earth-packed walls, its hooped handle glinting under our torchlight. I inched forward and pulled the handle. The door squealed open.

So much for quiet , I was about to say. The words dried on my tongue.

“Gracious gods,” Tari whispered.

I couldn’t respond.

Dark and hellish, with grime-encrusted metal bars and loose shackles snaking in the dirt, these prisons were unsuited to housing anyone remotely human.

Yet the vestiges of human life were everywhere.

Bare footmarks dimpled the floor of the empty cells, while boot-treads pitted deeper grooves in the open space. A hunk of gray bread lay discarded, a crescent-shaped bite taken out of it. The tang of urine and feces mixed with the coppery stench of blood.

If Garret had described Hunting as a business, then this... this was savagery .

Tari made a low sound of warning as I stepped into an empty cell. One corner of the tunnel had caved in, and its earth-spray had scattered outward, leaving the ground sharp and craggy underfoot. Something glimmered, and I squatted, tilting the light.

A sleek wooden cylinder sat on the dirt, half the size of my little finger and painted with a black stripe. A length of metal spiked one end, shorter and thinner than a dressmaker’s pin.

The memories flooded me: a cool cloth on my forehead; a prick behind my neck; Tari’s mother, Jala, telling her young daughter to make more ginger tea.

I lifted the instrument by its wooden end and held it to the light.

“A dispenser,” Tari said. Her mother had used them during my bout of blueneck fever. The cylinders contained medicines—or nightmilk, for sedation—and pressure on the needle head emptied their contents into the bloodstream.

I twitched my finger toward the metal. My specter lurched, twisting from the residue on the needle. “Dullroot.”

I flung the dispenser aside and stood. Xerylite mines had been used as strongholds during the Starling Rebellion, emblematic of Wielder resistance.

This site had been transformed into a Wielder slaughter ground.

“It’s like the Capewells’ hold,” I said. “The copycats must be bringing the Wielders here before killing them. Or”—I looked toward the disintegrating wall—“they were bringing them here.” The collapse must have driven them to abandon this location.

“Why?” Tari’s voice trembled. “Why would anyone do this to innocent Wielders?”

My specter squirmed, my own rising horror mixed with outrage. I said bitterly, “There is no such thing as an innocent Wielder.”

Then I grabbed an unlit torch, touched it to my flames, and plonked it in Tari’s hand.

She startled. “Where are you going?”

“To look around.”

Her expression darkened. “You said—”

“That we’d leave once we found something.”

“I think this ”—she threw her arm wide—“qualifies as finding something .”

“There might be a clue here as to where they went. We need to find them before they Hunt again.”

“Alissa, it’s too dangerous.”

“Then stay here if you’re afraid.” I turned. “I’ll be back.”

“Alissa—”

I stormed away.

I had slim odds of discovering anything else here. But how could I leave without trying when, all this time, the Hunted Wielders were being slaughtered under my province? Marge would’ve been among them, unaware that she was just a few miles from home when they’d run a final blade through her.

My bruised neck smarted as I imagined my lifeblood spilling by that same blade.

Because the keeper would do this to me, too, the moment the compass’s needle pointed in my direction.

The eighteen years of my life—every moment of love and pain and longing—would be reduced to a bare footprint inside a cell.

A bolt of fear hastened my steps.

Then I stopped before a mound of crumbled earth, riddled with rock and debris. This section had caved in, too. Perhaps the entire structure was unstable.

But what if answers stood on the other side, just five feet away?

Squaring my shoulders, I poured my specter toward the mound. Powdered earth trickled at the disturbance, pattering my boots. I wriggled deeper, teeth gritted against the weight.

Voices rumbled on the stagnant air, coming from behind.

My specter jolted, walls shuddering around the mound. But my blood hummed with new promise.

I carefully withdrew the tendril and set the torch in a spare holder. Tari was right; it would be a beacon.

I followed the voices back the way I’d come, hugging the walls and breathing raggedly. I stopped outside an open chamber where light bled through the darkness.

“It’s definitely Ansoran?” The voice was deep, authoritative.

“It’s the ancient language, for sure.”

“How can you tell?” A third voice, female and husky.

“Because it’s the only language I can’t read.”

“Is now the time for bragging?” the woman asked.

“It’s not bragging if it’s the truth.”

“Enough, both of you.” The first voice again. His timbre tickled my memory, but I couldn’t pinpoint its owner. “Do you know anyone who could read it?”

A hesitation. Then the other man replied stiltedly, “You’d be lucky to find a living being who can read the old language.” Not quite an answer, I noticed.

“Then what are you even good for?” A fourth, gravelly voice sent a shard of ice through me.

Drink , that voice had ordered during my kidnapping, gloved fingers handing me a nightmilk vial. I hadn’t realized my fear had seared the moment into my memory. Yet I knew now, with certainty and fresh alarm, that this voice belonged to Goren.

And these were Keil’s Wielders.

My fists clenched. I’d assumed Keil was working alone to recover the compass for his empress. Clearly, his cronies had lingered in Daradon to help. But I’d acquired these coordinates from Junius—who’d obtained them from Kevi Banday’s wife. How had they beaten me here?

“Nobody’s here, Dash,” said the woman, Osana. “Maybe her information was wrong.”

Dashiel sighed in reluctant agreement. “This isn’t exactly what we were expecting.”

I poked my head around the threshold. Four figures occupied the rugged room, black masks again concealing the lower halves of their faces.

All wore hoods apart from Lye, whose blond hair fell loose to his shoulders.

He shifted, and in the flickering light of the torch he carried, I saw what they’d been looking at:

A swirling, rounded symbol—the same symbol etched into the weapon at my belt—glaring red on the earthen wall.

I almost heaved. This wasn’t like the Hunters’ Mark I’d scrubbed from Marge’s door. Somehow I knew from the dark color, from the macabre drippage that had gathered and dried into the ground... this wasn’t paint. It was blood.

Wielder blood.

A shuffle sounded, and I ducked from view.

“Who’s there?” Dashiel called. “Show yourself.”

I crept away, heart pounding.

Then Tari’s shriek tore into the silence.