Page 202 of The Edge of Darkness

“Considering this particular commission was a secret to begin with, that will not be a problem.”

“Splendid.” He went back to the beaker he had been tending to when we arrived. “I must tell you, your power will remain in the locket indefinitely—a keepsake, if you will. No one will be able to access it so long as the corvium remains in a solid state. And you need not worry about that because it would take a fire hotter than any that burns on this earth to melt it back down, now that it has been forged with magic.” He chuckled to himself. “Trust me, I’ve tried. That’s the thing I love about corvium; it will stand the test of time.”

“Thank you, Corvus.” Laurent bowed his head. “Come, Niall, let us leave this old male to his craft.”

As we made the trek back through the cold tunnels, I turned the amulet in my hand. “Think it’ll do the job, if needed?”

Laurent stared, thoughtfully, then nodded with complete confidence. “I think this is the closest you’ll get to anything of the sort. Let’s just hope you don’t have to use it.”

Upon my return to Calledan, Auren met me at the doors of The Keep.

“There you are!” she exclaimed. “I really wish this mind connection worked both ways. It’s completely unfair that you can call out to me whenever you wish, but I can’t do it back to you.” She wrapped her arms around me in a tight hug.

“I missed you too,” I said, chuckling as I planted a kiss on her forehead.

The doors opened once more, and to my surprise, Aremis stepped out.

Auren, I’d expected, but Aremis . . . he was supposed to still be in Benmoor. If he was here, that meant something was wrong.

The seriousness in his face confirmed it.

“What is it?” I called out to my second.

Auren peeled away and looked up at me. “Oh! There’s an urgent message for you. It’s from Fallon.”

“Fallon?”

“Yes,” Aremis said, holding the door open for us. “He had a vision. Morah and I ported here a little more than an hour ago to tell you. Come.”

An anxious twinge began twisting in my gut as I followed them inside.

Morah stood waiting, wringing her hands together. “Hi,” she said, an air of urgency in her voice.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Not yet, at least. Fallon had a vision this morning. It wasn’t complete, as his ability is still recuperating from the damage that was done, but it was unsettling enough that we thought we needed to tell you. He saw the human queen standing above two bodies—one male, one female—both covered in blood. He couldn’t make out their faces, but he saw the queen handing something to someone, and the bodies beneath her began to heal when she did. He didn’t see what she was holding, only that a pair of pale, feminine hands accepted it.”

Pale, feminine hands . . . Only one being came to mind.

Skadi.

I churned the other information over in my head. The two bodies could be anyone. But male and female together, the symbolic meaning of that . . . They had to mean something to each other. As for what the queen was holding . . . If she was handing something to Skadi, it had to have been the amulet. There was nothing else the goddess would want.

But the queen didn’t have the real amulet—that we knew of. If anything, the vision showed her handing off the decoy . . .

Which meant . . . I would need to give it to her.

“Did he say anything else about the vision? Did the queen look like she was in the midst of war?”

Morah shook her head. “That was all he saw. He even mediated on it for a while afterward to try and focus on the obscure object and the faces of the others. But still, nothing.”

I couldn’t verify out loud what I was assuming the queen had in her hands. If I did, Auren would know about the decoy, and so would Morah.

As if Aremis knew my dilemma, he flicked his eyes to me and held my stare.

Are you arriving at the same conclusion I am? I asked him.

Uh-huh. Need me to say something?