Secret in the Stone

by Kamilla Benko

  Dead.

  Her death will be the key to our victory.

  Fear gripped Claire’s stomach and flipped it. She hunched over, thinking she was going to be sick all over the grass.

  A warm hand gripped her shoulder. “Breathe,” Sophie instructed. “Deep breaths.”

  Claire obeyed, and after a minute or two her stomach settled, though she couldn’t say the same for her thoughts.

  “I want to go home,” she mumbled, the words coming before she could stop them.

  Sophie released Claire’s shoulder and pulled the Kompass from her pocket. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, Clairina, but you need to pull it together. We need to go.”

  “I know!” Claire said. “We need to go home.”

  Shaking her head, Sophie flicked open the Kompass. “First, we need to go to wherever Anvil and Aquila are. We need to warn them. And once we do that, I promise, Claire, we’ll go home.”

  “But—” Claire’s words were cut off by the click of the Kompass snapping shut.

  “This way!” Sophie called, breaking into a jog.

  And with a sigh, Claire ran to keep up.

  She had gone on hikes with her family before, and enjoyed them, especially in the spring when everything smelled clean and freshly green. But running down a mountain while fleeing an angry guild and a murderous secret society was an entirely different matter. Each gentle brush of breeze turned sinister as it shook the pine needles. And as branches clacked against one another, she couldn’t help but think they sounded like teeth snapping shut.

  Still, they couldn’t run the entire time. As they slowed to a walk, Claire wondered what they would tell Mom and Dad. It was possible that they might not have even noticed the girls were missing. Time ran differently in Arden. Sometimes, it ran by so fast entire months had passed here in Arden by the time Sophie returned the next night to Windemere, and other times, when Claire had woken that horrible morning to discover Sophie was gone, it seemed to slow down. It made Claire’s head hurt to think about it.

  They took breaks, alternating between jogging and walking, and only stopped once to pick some blackberries Anvil had told them were safe to eat. Then they began to run again.

  Sooner than Claire thought possible, the afternoon light began to grow long and golden. It would have been beautiful if she didn’t know what came next: a cold night filled with even colder shadows. Shadows that bit and tore. Wraiths.

  Glancing around, Claire wondered where the wraiths hid during the day. She assumed they lived underground, where even a midsummer’s sun couldn’t penetrate. She supposed it was possible they could live in hollow trees. And if that were the case, maybe they could be hiding right under their noses this very second.

  Shivering, she tried to shake off the creepiness. No more bad thoughts. No more worst-case scenarios. She would only think about beautiful things.

  Like unicorns—the unicorn they had freed from the stone had driven back the wraiths. For a time, anyway.

  “Hey Sophie?” Claire called to her sister as they slowed to a walk. “What do you know about unicorns?”

  “A few things,” Sophie said, using a walking stick to push back a thorn bush so that they could pass. With her other hand, she consulted the Kompass.

  “Like what?” Claire pressed.

  “Well,” Sophie said thoughtfully, “unicorns can heal. And when they walk, they sometimes leave snowdrops in their prints. They can also unlock anything. Doors, chests, you name it. And,” she said with a glance over her shoulder, “I’m guessing, passages between worlds.”

  Realization dawned on Claire. She knew that Prince Martin had had the help of a powerful Forger in order to craft a passageway between home and Arden, but she had never given much thought to the unicorns’ role in the chimney’s creation. She wondered if their adventure now would have even been possible without a unicorn.

  When Sophie ran out of unicorn stories, she switched to asking Claire questions about magic. How had Claire done magic that first time? What, exactly, did Claire mean by feeling a hum?

  And for the hundredth time, Claire explained how she’d first mistaken her Gemmer abilities for a buzz in her bones—a slight tingle that felt like her fingers were going asleep. And how only later did she realize that it was a sign of crafting. That it was an itch to create.

  “I mean, I’m aching to create, too,” Sophie grumbled. “It’s just not working.” She unclenched her fist, to reveal a small sapphire, one that must have fallen from Claire’s dress. As they’d run, branches had torn at their dresses. The sleeve of Sophie’s gown had completely unraveled, trailing long strands of silver threads, while Claire’s dress was missing half its sapphires.

  She hadn’t realized that Sophie had picked one up. She hadn’t realized that her sister had been trying to make it glow this entire time.

  “We’re going home soon,” Claire said, trying to make Sophie feel better. “It doesn’t matter if you have magic or not.”

  “Yes it does!” Sophie said, and Claire took a half step back at the fierceness in her sister’s voice. “In the past year, I’ve missed out on so many things. The seventh grade overnight. The last day of school. Even my birthday …” Sophie took a deep breath, her shoulders rising. “I don’t want to miss out on this, too.”

  “I’m sorry,” Claire said. “I didn’t mean—”

  But Sophie seemed to be too caught up in her own thoughts to listen. “You have this great gift—magic!—and you’re too scared to stay and use it. Of course magic matters.” Sophie let the sapphire drop, then flounced ahead, putting space between them.

  Claire let her.

  Because Sophie was right. Claire was scared. She did want to go home. The Royalists wanted her dead. She wasn’t being a coward, she was being safe … wasn’t she? She stooped to try to search for the sapphire among the fallen leaves. Maybe Sophie just needed to try again.

  “CLAIRE!”

  Claire’s head snapped up. Sophie had stopped, and was waving wildly. “CLAIRE, COME HERE!”

  Claire ran toward her sister. “What is it?” she panted. “Royalists?”

  “I found—oh, just come look!” Sophie pulled Claire behind the tree and pointed to a glittering spider’s web lacing together the dead branches of a bush. The spider’s silk was incandescent, seeming to shimmer with the same luminosity that she’d seen in pearls, or the underside of a seashell or …

  A jolt of electricity shot through her spine.

  The strings of the Unicorn Harp.

  The strings that had once been part of a unicorn’s flowing mane.

  “He was here!” Sophie said, shouting triumphantly. “The unicorn!” She looked at Claire, her brown eyes shining with a feverish radiance. “Claire, I know you want to go home. And we will! But when we tell Anvil and Aquila that the unicorn is so close, do you think—can we maybe stay?” She broke off, and stared hopefully at Claire.

  Cautiously, Claire reached out her finger and touched the hairs. They felt like the silkiest of threads. Something as tentative and thin as moth wings brushed her heart.

  Maybe she didn’t have to be a coward.

  Her heart beat faster.

  Maybe … she could help Arden after all.

  A smile crept across her face, a kind that she didn’t think she’d ever felt before, but recognized well. It was a twin to Sophie’s own wild grin—and Sophie knew it, too.

  “Yes!” Sophie said, giving a little spin that made her underskirt twirl out like the top of a cupcake. “Let’s find ourselves a unicorn!”

  Claire’s newfound confidence lasted until they reached a river she thought she recognized. The sun had turned into a red eye in the sky, slipping ever faster to the horizon. She peered at the Kompass in Sophie’s hand. The needle, which had once been as long as her pinkie finger, was now only the length of its nail.

  “I think that means Aquila is close by,” Sophie said, squinting down at the object in her hand, then scanning the trees. “It’s been
shrinking all day.”

  Again, Claire’s fingers brushed the unicorn mane in her pocket. “She must be close because the unicorn is close,” she said.

  “Mmm,” Sophie replied, sounding noncommittal. “Does the chimera over there look familiar to you? I think we’re near the bottom of the mountain.”

  Claire looked toward where her sister was pointing, and sure enough, there was the glint of sunlight off metal. She was relieved Sophie had reminded her about chimera—if she hadn’t, Claire would have probably mistaken it for the glint of sunlight off sword, instead of the strange, stiff metal beasts that dotted Arden’s terrain.

  While chimera looked ferocious, Claire didn’t feel scared—only sad. During the Guild War, the Tillers and Forgers had worked together to craft these metal monsters to face the Gemmers on the battlefield. But as Arden’s magic seemed to fade, so had the chimera. Many slowed down and then finally stopped altogether, frozen where they stood.

  This particular chimera clung to a tree’s trunk, and was a cross between a lynx and an owl, its sleek, feline body interrupted by a pair of enormous copper wings. The chimera’s magic must have run out midclimb, its claws sinking into the mottled bark for three hundred years. No Forger today knew how to make them come alive again … except for, perhaps, one.

  Again, Claire thought of her friend Sena. Her parents, Mathieu and Sylvia Steele, had been alchemists, illegally combining Tiller and Forger magic together to experiment with possibilities. Sena had told her how they had managed to bring a small chimera kitten back to life, and when they’d been found out, Sylvia had been sentenced with lifelong imprisonment while Mathieu, a Tiller, was sentenced to execution for masquerading as a Forger all those years. And Sena—poor Sena!—had been taken in by Nett’s grandfather, Francis Green.

  Claire walked a little faster. She didn’t like Francis Green. Not after what he’d done. Not after he’d betrayed them.

  Soon, Sophie called out again, and this time, Claire followed her gaze to a small stone hut, complete with a waterwheel that churned slowly in the Rhona’s waters. It looked like a cottage in a fairy tale, where Snow White might hide from her evil stepmother. It was—and there was no other word for it—cute.

  “I can barely see the needle now,” Sophie said, clicking the Kompass shut and putting it in her pocket. “I think Aquila must be in there.”

  Claire felt her rib cage expand with relief. They wouldn’t have to spend a night without protection from the wraiths. She glanced back over her shoulder. Still no sign of Royalist blue or Wraith Watch white. But even with Aquila nearby, danger was still too close for comfort.

  The girls hurried to the hut, Claire desperately aware of the shadows that grew longer and longer in the sun’s wake.

  “Aquila?” Sophie called as she pushed open the rotting door. “Hello?”

  No one answered.

  “Maybe she’s out back?” Claire said, looking around. It was difficult to see in the dingy, unlit hut. She stepped in a little more. Grabbing a stubborn sapphire, she began to polish. There was the familiar hum in her bones, then light.

  She sucked in a breath.

  Traveling supplies were spread in disarray across the wooden floor—small parcels of food, maps, blankets … and two twin axes, their tips hooked like eagles’ beaks.

  Aquila’s axes.

  They lay on the floor, abandoned like the rest of the house. Claire didn’t need any magical craft to know something bad had happened.

  “Claire,” Sophie said, and the tone of her voice sent tingles up Claire’s spine. Slowly, she looked at her sister. Her hands were clasped over her mouth, as if holding back a scream. In the hallway, two figures loomed. Two very familiar figures.

  “Light,” Sophie commanded in a strangled voice. For once, maybe because Claire was scared, the sapphire glowed intensely. As she raised the gem higher, blue light washed over the figures.

  It was them.

  Anvil and Aquila Malchain.

  Anvil’s ax was raised above his head, looking as if he were about to chop something, his face snarled in an expression of rage. Aquila’s grandmotherly bun had unraveled, and her gray hair streamed out behind her as if she had been running, one hand gripping a knife while the other was clenched into a fist.

  And both of them were utterly and completely still.

  Still as stone.

  CHAPTER

  16

  The sapphire in Claire’s hand clattered to the ground as she leaped back. It spun wildly across the dirt floor, sending circles of blue throughout the room before it swiveled to a stop in front of Aquila’s boot.

  Claire’s stomach clenched and she had to breathe through her nose to choke back the rising bile. A warm, wet liquid dripped from her hands. Looking down, she saw that she’d cut herself on the sapphire’s sharp edges.

  Sophie, her hands still clapped across her mouth, inched toward the Malchains. Cautiously, she picked up the sapphire and held it closer to Aquila. The Forger’s face was twisted into an expression of horror.

  Sophie huffed in, then flashed out her hand to the woman’s arm. She whipped her hand back. “She’s cold,” Sophie whispered. “And hard. She feels like …”

  “Like rock,” Claire finished grimly.

  But it wasn’t as if the Forger had been turned to stone. Her cheeks still blushed pink, her hair still shone a steely gray, but there was no life to her pallor, no sense of the body’s ability to change and fold and wrinkle.

  Though every nerve screamed at her not to, Claire took a step closer. She couldn’t abandon her friends—not again. Nett’s mischievous eyes and tufted hair flew into her mind. Everyone who helped Claire ended up getting hurt. The very least she could do was look.

  Red glittered on Aquila’s arm. Motioning Sophie to lift the sapphire a little higher, Claire saw that Aquila had been injured. A shallow graze that skimmed the skin. But the red was not blood.

  “Rubies,” Claire choked out. “Her blood—it’s been turned to rubies.”

  “What? ” Sophie squeaked. She’d sucked in her cheeks, looking gaunt and ghostlike. In fact, as Claire looked at her sister, Sophie seemed to shrink in on herself, regressing back to the pitiful girl she’d been in the hospital. She looked younger. She looked scared.

  Claire had the odd sensation that suddenly the tables had turned, and she was the older sister who knew everything. But instead of feeling smug, she felt only numbness.

  “Scholar Pumus says there are minerals in the blood that can be crystallized and turned into rock,” Claire explained. She took another deep breath to steady the rising nausea. “It must have been a Gemmer who did this to them.” She thought for a moment. “Everyone at Stonehaven thinks Unicorn and Queen Rocks were destroyed by Forgers—maybe they blamed Anvil and Aquila. Someone from Stonehaven must have wanted revenge.”

  Sophie shuddered. “Do you think they’ve been here, like … this … ever since we entered Stonehaven?”

  Claire wished Sophie would stop asking the hardest questions. “I don’t know … but it’s been a while, I think.”

  An untouched layer of dust covered the floor. If it had happened recently, there would have been footprints or no dust at all. Her own question was at the tip of her tongue. “Pumus said magic like this—big, I mean—hasn’t worked in three hundred years. Do you think …?”

  “No,” Sophie said, shaking her head. “Definitely not.”

  Because the sisters knew each other so well, Claire didn’t have to say her real fear: that Queen Estelle d’Astora of Arden was back. Alive and well. And that she was the one who had turned the Malchains into stone. A petty revenge on the descendants of the Forger who had helped her little brother escape with the Unicorn Treasure.

  “Are they,” Sophie started, “I mean, have they …?”

  Claire shook her head. “They’re not dead, I don’t think. Not yet.”

  Stepping away from Aquila, she looked at Anvil, who stood next to her and slightly behind. It looked like he’d been
shouting something. His eyes stared straight ahead, and maybe it was a trick of the sapphire’s light, but Claire had the sense that he could see them.

  Tentatively, she reached out a hand and patted his side. Unlike Sophie, she didn’t flinch away. After her weeks of being an apprentice at Stonehaven, she knew that rock, too, was alive in its own way, capable of transformation.

  “How can ruby blood not kill them?” Sophie asked, shuffling forward.

  “It will, over time, if we don’t do anything about it,” Claire said slowly, trying to remember exactly what Scholar Pumus had said in class. “But I have an idea.”

  Grabbing a mug that had rolled away on the floor, Claire hurried to the back door and to the edge of the Rhona River. She dipped it into the water until it was full. Hurrying back inside, she sprinkled some water on Aquila’s hand.

  “Every living thing needs water,” Claire said as Sophie looked at her dubiously. “And when you sculpt clay, you add water to help shape it.”

  “You think you can mold her back to herself?” Sophie asked.

  “Usually I wouldn’t,” Claire said. “But we don’t have the usual help.” From her pocket, she pulled out the knot of unicorn mane. “Unicorn artifacts help make guild magic stronger, so this will make mine stronger, too.”

  Claire dipped her fingers into the mug again, and ran her wet fingertips over Aquila’s hand. It was cold, but Claire remembered how Aquila had used this same hand to teach Claire and Sophie how to sharpen a sword with a whetstone.

  And when they’d separated—Aquila to search for the unicorn, and Anvil to escort the girls to Stonehaven—Aquila had flashed a smile, her teeth as shiny as the two battleaxes strapped across her back.

  “The cautious never leave, but the restless don’t get far,” Aquila had chided a nervous Claire. “Anvil, take care of that blade, will you? And make sure you don’t lose any thumbs. I’m tired of sewing them back on for you.”

  Aquila might have the rosy cheeks of the kind of grandma who baked cookies after school, but she was just as lethal—if not more—as her younger cousin.