Page 94

Leather strapping hung limply at the bed’s side. The featherbed dusted with mould. She rubbed the leather through her fingers, noticing the buckles forged from Lodamante. The strap fell away.

A heavy pit formed in her stomach.

Something was stuck in the stone on the wall. She leant over the bed. Her hand slapped over her mouth to halt the bile threatening to surge.

Delicate fingernails were wedged into the stone. Dried blood still coated the surrounding wall.

All the colour drained from her face. She took a shaky breath, stepping backwards.

She fled the room; it sealed behind her.

Something unthinkable had happened in that room.

And the nagging feeling eating away at her told her Alcaeus would know exactly what.

Chapter 22

Idonea brewed a cup of black tea; strong, bitter, astringent enough to steady her hands. The fragrant steam curled around her face, grounding her breath. She carried it to the table and lowered the hatch again.

She sat as the tea warmed her palms, even though the rest of her stayed cold. She kept her eyes away from her fingernails.

The Thaalrun book lay open before her. Its title winding across the cover in serpentine script, a language that looked cut into the page rather than written.

With a brief glance towards the locked front door, she slipped the torn relic page from her clothes. She smoothed the brittle parchment beside the book.

The characters matched.

She flipped through the book page by page, finding no hidden translations in the margins. Only the same indecipherable strokes repeating across hundreds of pages. Patterns that made her temples throb if she stared too long.

She found similarities between her page and the book, but nothing that revealed meaning.

Idonea had just taken another swallow of tea when the front door was unbarred with a heavy scrape.

Lysander stepped inside, frost clinging to his cloak. His eyes cut immediately to the table, then to the torn page.

“What is that?” He didn’t come any closer than the door.

Idonea’s grip tightened around her cup. “A page on the relic. But it’s written in Thaalrun.”

He inched towards her. “May I see it?”

“You said you didn’t know the language.” She lifted a brow, suspicion rising like a tide.

Lysander’s jaw tightened. “I said I never learned it. But I’ve seen enough to recognise certain structures.”

She drained the rest of her tea, set the cup down, and nudged the page towards him. “Well?”

Lysander hesitated before picking it up. He studied the strokes and gave her a searching look.

Then, with a faint exhale, he read aloud:

“Born of wyrm’s blood and Current’s storm,

the heart that rends the worlds as one.

Within this crystal sleeps the gate—

a passage wrought by death and fate.