I touched the back of her hand, and when she didn’t lash out, I curled my fingers closed, closing her hand in mine. I’d hoped to soothe her, but her sobs worsened.
“How long?” she asked.
I settled my hand awkwardly on her shoulder. “Arach has been in ruins for hundreds of years, maybe thousands. No one is sure. It’s always been this way.”
She reared up, and I expected her to slap or maybe stab me, but instead, she threw her arms around me and sobbed into my chest. I rocked back, arms out, trying to keep us from falling. Once I regained my balance, I stayed crouched, wondering if it was safe to close my arms around her. I did, but oh so slowly. She slumped into the embrace so that I had little choice but to hold her close as her sobs rippled through us. She seemed so … small in my arms, in this place, and so very alone. She had told me she’d lost everything.
I rested my cheek on her head and closed my eyes. I didn’t understand her, but I understood loneliness. I wanted to tell her she didn’t have to be alone; that it was a wretched way to live, and that if she let others in, she would smile again. But these were all foolish thoughts for a foolish thief.
We stayed like that awhile. After minutes or hours, her sobs ceased and her body stopped trembling, but she didn’t move from my arms. Her hair smelled of ginger lily and warm leather. I remembered noting that before, but I couldn’t remember when. I pushed aside all thoughts of the madness chasing us and paused in the moment.
Butterflies flittered about the ruins of the crumbled hall. The people of Arach were long dead, but the place was still beautiful, even in its sadness, and perhaps all the more beautiful because the wilderness had reclaimed it.
If she hadn’t realized the ruins were actual ruins, then perhaps she’d been wrong about the Dragon’s Eye too. I couldn’t imagine there was anything of value left in this place. Such things would have been plundered long ago. I should have cared, but I didn’t, not with her so close.
“How did this happen?” she asked quietly. One hand slipped from my shoulder and settled lightly on my forearm. It didn’t mean anything, that shift, but all my thoughts funneled to that touch and how easy it would be to take her hand in mine and lift her fingers to my lips.
“Just boyhood stories come to mind. The restless gods became displeased with the builders of Arach. The Arachians built it so well, with great columns that climbed into the sky and art that outshone that which the gods could create. It is said the gods tried to claim the halls for themselves, but the ruins crumbled around them and they were forced to stalk the moors instead.”
Her thumb stroked lazy circles on my wrist, casting my thoughts into dangerous territory. We couldn’t stay like this.
“And where did you hear this story?” she asked, her cheek still pressed against my shirt, over my heart. “Not in Brea’s Outer Circle …”
She couldn’t see how I had closed my eyes or know how I struggled to keep my voice level. “No. My mother read stories to me and my sister before bed.”
“I would have liked your mother, although I do not agree with her version of events.”
“Then you would have loved the one about how the Inner Circle got its spire. It is filled with dragons and knights. Although the story says the Inner Circle High Guard were the knights, my sister and mother were not convinced.”
“Tell me of the spire.”
“In the tales, all the magic in all the world is locked inside.”
“I would like to visit this spire one day.”
Around and around her thumb stroked. Her words, when she spoke, strummed through my chest, and then there was the fact her other hand had settled on the back of my neck, soft and warm against my skin.
“It’s vast, up close. It towers into the clouds some days.” I stopped and gritted my teeth. I had said too much. Although she had guessed I was born inside the Inner Circle, admitting it felt like I had given away too much of myself—exposing something raw and vulnerable.
A cloud blotted out the sun, casting a shadow over the ruins. With the chill came a cool breeze that swept up the ’lion fuzz and shooed away the butterflies. The moment was slipping. I clung on to it for a few more heartbeats and then reluctantly shifted back and opened my arms. Her thumb stopped its gentle strokes and her body tensed. She looked up, close enough to kiss. Her dark eyes were bright with unshed tears.
“I suppose we won’t be finding any Dragon’s Eyes today?” I smiled and deliberately eased farther back, away from temptation.
She got to her feet and watched me rise to mine. I expected her to slot her mask back into place, but her expression remained open.
“It’s here, but it will not be easy to reach. Are you ready, thief?” she asked with a crooked smile, leaving no doubt that her use of “thief” was deliberately designed to irritate me.
“Why yes, princess.” I brushed my clothes down. “The sooner we break the bond, the sooner we can both be on our way.”
Her fragile smile broke and fell away, and something twisted in my gut. More regrets.
I turned away to hide my wince. “Lead on, princess.”
She did, jogging over the fallen stones. When I next saw her face, her mask was back, and any sign of the honesty inside had vanished.
Her Princessness gave me her dagger and told me to dig. This became less amusing when I realized she wasn’t joking and did, in fact, want me to dig a hole with two daggers.
She stood on a fallen column, hand on hip, waiting for me to get down on my knees. I’d seen that look before, right before she asked me to drink from her poisoned cup. She had the cup on her now, tucked in the pouch strung to her belt.
“You dig,” I replied.
“That would be an inefficient use of your musculature. From your build, you are clearly stronger than I am. It makes perfect sense that you should be the one to dig and see if I am correct about the chamber entrance.”
“How convenient for you.”
“This is not about convenience, thief.”
I repeated her sentence, muttering it to myself while mimicking her haughty voice, got down on my knees, and punched the blades into the earth.
“You’ll be free of me soon enough,” she said.
I hesitated, but didn’t look up. My earlier comment about the bond had landed hard between us. It might have even torn down the moment we had shared in the ruined hall and trampled on it. I was as much annoyed with myself as with her. I was getting involved, which any thief worth their fee did not do. It was the tears and hugs that had done it. Unlike her, my heart wasn’t made of stone. Well, I wasn’t falling for that womanly horseshit again. With every stab into the soil, I vowed to keep my distance. This was strictly business, same as I’d told the man back in Calwyton, Tassen. Find the Eye, break the bond, steal the Eye, sell it, and vanish. A simple enough plan, if I could keep my thoughts under control and stop them from wandering back to her.
I dug hard, expecting to twist the blades and ruin them for good, but they didn’t even suffer a scratch. Unearthing a capstone was a good start and got Her Haughtiness excited enough for her to get in the hole with me and dig around the edges with her hands. After freeing what we could and putting our combined strength behind it, we managed to heave the stone aside to reveal a gap large enough for us to crawl through.
“Don’t look at me like that. You go first. Your musculature is far more conducive to small spaces than mine is, sweetheart.” From her look, I gathered she liked sweetheart less than princess and mentally stored that fact for later use. “Well, what are you waiting for? Winter?”
She ignored me and missed my smile as she plunged a torch made from rags and grasses into our measly campfire. She then dropped it alight into the hole and followed behind it, working her body through the gap until just her fingers clung on. And then she was gone.
This would have been a fine time to leave, if not for the bond and the promise of treasure. I took one long look at the ruins. Shadows had gathered in the late-afternoon light. A w
arg couldn’t fit through the gap, but a mage might. With that thought spurring me on, I checked the dagger against my back, wished I’d had time to gather more supplies before Calwyton had burned, and then worked myself through the gap after her. I dangled from the edge, let go, and landed in a crouch in what appeared to be a cramped passageway. In the flickering torchlight, Shaianna’s shadow danced around her and over the rough stone walls.
“I hope you know where you’re going.” My voice carried far down the passageway and disappeared into unknown spaces. A shiver crawled down my spine.
“Have I led you astray yet?”
I didn’t answer and followed close, staying within her torchlight. The air tasted of stone and dust and dried my lips, but there was movement to it, like whispers across the back of my neck.
I wanted to ask if Shaianna believed in ghosts, but assumed I’d get a cryptic answer that would do more to unnerve me than put my mind at ease.
We passed several small annexes that led nowhere, at least as far as I could see with Shaianna’s fleeting torchlit examinations.
“How do you know which way to go?” I asked.
“There is only one way.”
We had dropped into the middle of a passage, so there was the other way to choose from, but the quiet in the passage seemed too thick to break over idle chatter. The deeper we went, the denser the darkness became. The walls moved in, reminding me of another place where doors rang, locks jangled, and walls were just as close. Fear prickled my skin. Shaianna’s torch flickered, bright and alive, but without it, we would be plunged into the dark, just like the times I’d been locked in the workhouse’s cellars as punishment.
I trailed my hand along the wall. Dust and flakes of ancient plaster fell away. Not trapped—not trapped—not trapped. There were no locked doors here.
“How did you know where the entrance was?” I whispered as she slowed and stopped at an intersection.
“I listened to the whispers.”
The whispers. Like on the moor. I rubbed a hand over my neck, brushing off the whispers there too. “How are we going to find the Eye by torchlight?”
“You ask too many questions.”
She turned left. I moved to follow but spotted a statue tucked into a carved alcove. “Wait …”
She paused and peered over her shoulder at me.
The dragon statue and alcove had been hewn from the rock. The serpentine beast, with wings cresting high above its head, lifted its maw to the ceiling, its clawed forelimbs reaching. Its exquisite detail had caught my eye, but it was its beauty that held me.
“Look at this.” It would be worth a fortune if I could think of a way to cut it free of its home and get it above ground.
“Come,” Shaianna urged.
I touched its wing and gasped as a layer of dust fell away, revealing the glimmer of precious gems beneath. A quick blow freed more dust from its sculpted head. Rubies gleamed in its eyes. Emeralds formed its scales. I licked the dust from my lips and swallowed hard. In my obsession to get the Eye, it hadn’t occurred to me that there could be other treasures to unearth here.
“Curtis.”
I snapped my head around at her use of my first name.
“Come,” she urged again. “The torch burns low.”
I bid the dragon statue farewell. I would be back. With more torches and pickaxes. Whatever it took. If a statue of such worth had lain undiscovered for centuries, what other treasures also lay in wait? The fact that we’d already found something valuable meant the Eye was likely still here. We had discovered a part of the ruins that hadn’t been robbed in antiquity. This was huge.
“What part of the ruins is this?” I asked, noticing the passage had widened enough for me to stretch both arms out and not touch the walls.
“The tomb,” Shaianna replied.
Ahead, a soft hum emanated from the dark. I had dismissed it as the thud of my heart in my ears, but it grew louder with every step. The scuffing sounds of our boots and muffled breaths carried far, and then stopped dead, as though some huge beast were swallowing the noise.
“A tomb for who?”
We approached a wall of black and stopped at the edge of a lip. The torch spluttered but the flame held, and yet I couldn’t see into the dark. The floor, the walls, the whole passage just ended. The low hum resonated from the black. I knew it was a vast space in the way the body could sense such things, but I had no idea how we were going to move ahead, unless by blind faith.
Shaianna was watching me as though expecting an answer.
I shrugged. “Can’t you”—I wiggled my fingers dramatically—“magic us a light?”
One of her smooth eyebrows twitched. She tossed the torch into the dark. It tunneled through the black. I leaned out to watch it fall. Shaianna gripped my arm and held me back.
“Watch,” she said, lifting her gaze.
The torch clattered on the floor far below and a mighty intake of breath—or so it sounded—whooshed around us. I stepped back and reached for my dagger, but caught Shaianna smiling at something in the distance. I saw it then too, a tiny light like a lone firefly dancing in the dark. And then another blinked beside it, soon followed by dozens more. They grew, slithered, and flowed, becoming narrow rivers of flame. The dark peeled back and revealed its secrets.
Layer after layer, the streams of flame circled around raised platforms and statues of men and women dressed in armor and brandishing swords easily my size. From the vast floor to the ceiling, the walls were painted with colorful scenes of people at peace, to fantastical images of great battles with a dragon-filled sky. The flames licked on, illuminating an underground coliseum so vast it could have swallowed all of Brea’s Inner Circle. Precious gems glittered along mosaic floors, and at the center of it all, carved from the same rock as every piece here, lay an enormous sleeping stone dragon. The size of a Brean tall ship, it lay on its belly with its wings pulled in. Colorful splashes of art speckled its flanks. The art and their gems glowed as though they’d been placed here only yesterday, but they had to be hundreds, if not thousands of years old.
“There is the Eye, thief.”
Shaianna pointed at the dragon’s head. It wasn’t sleeping, I realized. Both eyes had once been open, but one gem was missing. The other eye held the largest emerald I had ever seen, easily the size of my two hands.
It actually is an eye, a dragon’s eye. I laughed. What else could I do? My laughter rolled into the vast space around the monuments of a lost city.
Shaianna descended the stone stairs to my right, her steps confident. She knew this fantastic place in a way only someone who had visited here before could know it. The torch, the firelight, the location of the passageway—how could she know these things that had faded from memory and fallen into myth?
I followed her path down the steps and then through the gullies carved into stone and guarded by massive statues. The dragon’s single eye watched us.
Statues stood guard, proud and regal in their stone finery. I passed beneath them all, a sense of insignificance pushing down. Firelight warmed the wall paintings, the rippling firelight bringing the battle scenes to life. Men on horses charged a line of warrior people, their fierce kohl-rimmed eyes bright and hungry, beckoning the invaders on.
Despite what Shaianna said, I was no fool. These people looked like her. Dark hair, dark eyes, and some with gems glittering in strange patterns across their faces. So, then, her people must have been descended from the Arachians. A few hours ago, I hadn’t even considered that the Arachian people had existed.
I had stopped, held captive by the battle scene. Shaianna’s presence simmered behind my right shoulder. She moved to stand beside me, her arms crossed over her chest and her chin lifted high.
“There …” she said. “You see her there?”
I saw a woman, painted with exquisite detail, standing atop a moorland tor. She held no weapons, but she held her hands aloft as though directing her army below. Behind her, the sky swirled with win
ged beasts—dragons.
“A terrible battle. The beginning of the end.”
“Who won?”
She blinked and swallowed, then murmured, “Neither won. The losses were too great. The wrath of our queen was all-consuming.”
Shaianna’s wide eyes glistened. The firelight played in the teardrop gem. She uncrossed her arms and reached to touch the painted moorland. She wore her love for the lost queen in her expression. The queen must have been a formidable leader for a love as rich as Shaianna’s to span generations.
She pulled her hand back, curled her fingers into her palm, and then looked at me. Her eyes slightly widened in surprise, as though she had forgotten I was right beside her. Her mask slammed back into place, and her expression hardened all over again.
“Come, we must retrieve the Eye and leave this resting place.”
I took one long lingering look at the painting, at the men and women defending their land, and at the woman atop the moorland tor, her dark hair swept behind her and her face etched with determination. There were others around her, some on their knees reaching up, perhaps pleading with her. But there was a single figure who I might have missed. She was barely more than the queen’s shadow and could have been a mistake, as though the artist had tried to blend her into the background. I couldn’t imagine why, because she was beautiful in her black leather–wrapped attire. There was no mistaking her, but this chamber was ancient. The shadow could not be Shaianna. A relative, definitely, but not her.
I walked across a mosaicked plateau and stopped beside Shaianna to peer up at the vast stone dragon. Every scale had been expertly carved to perfectly overlap, like the tiles on a roof. Had I not seen such workmanship, I would have said it was impossible to carve something to such perfection.
“You must climb to her head, remove the Eye with your dagger, and bring it down to me.”
I brushed a hand across the dragon’s rear claw—as tall as me—and scanned for possible handholds and resting points. I could scale a building with little thought, but this monumental statue wouldn’t be that simple. The scales provided few places to grip, and then I would have to clamber back down with the heavy gem. “I hesitate to say it’s impossible …”
The Heartstone Thief (Dragon Eye Chronicles Book 1) Page 10