I landed at Devrim’s feet with a groan and clatter of metal, my dagger flying out of my hand and into the darkness of whatever chamber we’d gained beyond the sphere holding the well of healing.

  I released a heavy breath as the doors shut just in time behind us, remembering how Devrim and I had left the doors into the healing chamber open. It wouldn’t be safe to return to the archives as all the mournlings that had teemed beneath the well would be unleashed along those hallways, but at least we knew they were sealed off from accessing the entry chamber where we’d set up camp.

  The herald started down at me rather than offering me a hand up. My eyes adjusted to the darkness of the chamber and I spied my dagger at the edge of the hallway. I pushed myself up, ignoring the herald for the moment, and seized the dagger.

  Sniffing the air, I didn’t detect any mournlings, though that didn’t mean we were safe from them. This chamber was dark and musty, but it carried no stench of decay.

  “You thought quickly,” Devrim observed as he withdrew his lantern from his robes, holding it aloft before him.

  A gentle white glow emanated from the lantern, about as bright as the purple glow from the rest of the isla, which this chamber was strangely without.

  “Tell me, how is it you were able to open the door?” His gray gaze glinted in the low light.

  “I found a second keystone among the skeletons,” I explained without offering to show him my discovery. He’d already taken Spiritus, Naturally from me. I wasn’t going to surrender the keystone if I could help it. “And good thing too or they would have trapped us on the landing beside the door. We’d still be fighting them.”

  Devrim inclined his head, conceding for now. “Let’s see where this tunnel leads.”

  There was a domed ceiling over our heads, this one without the intricate decoration of the chamber beyond, and a single, narrow archway that wound out of the chamber.

  Devrim led the way out. “You asked me about who was in need of healing,” he spoke over the stead plod of our footsteps against the stone. “Many. The isla might one day be a site of pilgrimage for those the Order cannot help in other ways.”

  I wanted to ask why the Order’s famed healing abilities fell short in this regard but decided against it.

  After a few minutes of climbing our way up, a purple glow shone out ahead.

  I sighed again, this time in relief, as one of the towering statues and the strange, ancient trees stretched into view at the end of the hall.

  We’d found our way back to the main entry chamber.

  #

  I rushed to the end of the hall and stopped myself just in time—the hallway let out abruptly into the air, the floor of the entry chamber several stories below and the top of the isla’s entry chamber still several stories away above.

  Near the center of the entry chamber, Hytham knelt in front of a pair of soldiers.

  Though I’m sure it would have been wiser to have kept such feelings from the herald, I couldn’t help smiling as we came to the edge of the hall and found ourselves back within the courtyard of the isla. Fifty-odd feet below us, Hytham placed his hand on one of the two remaining knight’s shoulders. Why the ancients had a hallway that let out into the middle of a chamber wall with the floor fifty feet below made little sense, but this was a difficulty I could manage.

  The five who had been stationed within the courtyard looked more nervous than they had even when we left, glancing about them as though a mournling might lurk around any corner. They weren’t wrong to fear so—I had wondered aloud to Uncle before whether he believes mournlings can sense emotion, whether they might be drawn to terror in particular. He could not say, but I wondered if, by the end of this, I might be able to.

  I had been running through contingencies for what to do if Hytham had not returned before us. The herald’s lack of regard for his adjudicator didn’t offer many advantages for Hytham or my survival, though he had been confident that Hytham would see the soldiers and himself through after the boulder separated us. Had Hytham been worried about me as well?

  The adjudicator spun about at Devrim’s announcement of our return. Concern melted away into relief once he spotted me. “Art thou well?” Hytham called up to me.

  “Well enough,” I answered, not bothering to hide the warmth from my voice. We had made it back to the courtyard, and the herald had found what he had been looking for which was not the Seed after all. I felt more relaxed than I had been since our arrival, possibly since we set out from Shakerton in the first place. For once, all was well.

  “Would you like to squirrel down?” I asked the herald with a grin. He had been so insistent about the lift before—I did not blame him in his robes, though it would have been a simple matter to abandon his skirt for pants.

  “Humph,” he answered me.

  I stumbled back as he stepped off the precipice and plummeted toward the floor. The soldiers gave a cry, but a dozen feet from the bottom, the herald threw his hands out to the side and slowed his descent by what I could only describe as a pillow of light. He didn’t turn back to look up at me after he landed, merely brushed himself off and strode over to speak with the soldiers at the base of the lift.

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  All that was left for me was to squirrel down.

  My descent was going well until the last ten or so feet. I slipped on a branch, shouted, and fell out of the strange tree. Before I could flail or try to get my feet underneath me, Hytham was there. He snatched me out of the air and into his arms. “Thank you,” I exhaled, somewhat breathless from the fall.

  He grinned down at me. “I’m sure the pleasure is all mine.”

  So close to him, the blue of his eyes captivated me once again. They were as bright as Lifkin irises somehow and yet they were not gold, silver, or, even more rarely, copper like mine, flecked with green.

  Hytham set me down, his hands lingering on my back and elbows to support me as I gained my footing. “Art thou alright?”

  I brushed back the locks of hair that had fallen into my face, coating them with even more dust than had already fallen on me within the isla ruins. “Yes.” Better now. “And you?”

  He nodded. “We ran into some trouble shortly after the boulder separated us. We were pursued most of the way back.”

  Hytham affirmed that two other soldiers had fallen to mournlings as they tried to wend their way out of the tunnels. One of the soldiers had broken his leg leaping out of the way of the boulder, a break which Hytham had healed, and another had survived though they were badly shaken. He led me over to one of the piles of rubble so we could rest while I described my own experience with the herald.

  “The archives were incredible, though I wish the ancient Lifkin had taken more care to protect their manuscripts and scrolls from water damage. I’m sure they had no reason to do so—” I shook my head, marveling once again at where we were. Seeing the wonders they had created, being able to imagine this structure come to life, filled with Lifkin who did not live in fear or experience hunger but instead who busied themselves with innovation, with recording their ideas and experiences—how many archivists had there been? How old were the records in the chamber the herald and I had found?

  Emotion had thickened my voice once I managed to speak again. “I can hardly even tell you what it was like, finding that book that I turned over to the herald, however much I didn’t wish to.”

  Hytham grinned at that.

  “The way that Alapatour Renthea described spirit-magic, as a birthright of the Lifkin people, something we should not only continue to use but deepen our practice with . . .” I trailed off, searching again for the words and marveling at the doubling between what the first Alapatour had told me of the Seed and what Renthea wrote of what he called spiritum, spirit-magic.

  “I know how you found my magic at first, and that it is still strange to you.” I didn’t wish to condemn Hytham for such a belief, however painful it had been at the time. Especially since he wielded magic himself, I had hoped he might understand. “But the thought of someone not finding monstrous the power that I cannot help but to feel and to wield—it was such an encouragement.” I grinned up at him. “I am not sure how great the possibility with the doors open behind us, but I haven’t completely lost the hope that I can take you to the archive. Maybe there are more undamaged texts that the herald and I haven’t found yet.”

  Hytham had been carefully watching my expression. “I hope thou can as well.” He spoke softly, a fondness clinging to his voice.

  I didn’t have the chance to tell him about the room we had found with the vines before Devrim called us over. He had stepped into the lift by the time Hytham and I reached him.

  I had thought Devrim would congratulate Hytham on successfully guiding two of the soldiers back to the courtyard and having found a third passage back though I hadn’t yet asked him where it was.

  Devrim made space on the lift for the two of us to join him. Subtly, Hytham placed himself between me and Devrim.

  The herald called overhead, and the platform began to rise. “Your companion holds a great many surprises, Cranwin. Were you aware of her hidden talents and potential?”

  Hytham looked between me and Devrim. I hadn’t had the chance to tell him of the entirety of our journey and so he had no way of knowing precisely what the Herald referred to beyond the secrets we kept from him. “To some extent, yes.”

  “She has proven herself to be quite an asset to our cause. You are to be commended.”

  The adjudicator glanced again at me before thanking Devrim for his compliment. We both suspected that there was more lurking behind the herald’s words than the seeming praise of my skills.

  But we would not have the opportunity to explore it further.

  The sound of something large, moving at speed through the tunnels reached us when we were halfway up from the courtyard, the soldiers carefully turning the wheels of the lift high overhead.

  Below us, the soldiers screamed as a skittering, slithering mournling came into view. Part giant spider with a scorpion tail, its body somehow winding about itself like a snake, it burst into the courtyard toward the soldiers.

  The spider-mournling was all too familiar.

  I screamed as well—the glinting hilt of an elaborately fashioned longsword poked out of the creature’s head, something I hadn’t noticed when it had pursued me and Hytham out of the cavern near Twisted River. I stepped back toward the center of the platform. All movement of the lift had ceased, and the soldiers overhead shouted one to the next, though it was nothing compared to the screams echoing up from below.

  Over the next several moments, my body acted on its own. I covered my face to avoid seeing the sprays of blood as the creature’s pincers severed torso from legs and tossed the different, bleeding sets about. But then I realized I might help, however distantly, and I struggled to free my longbow from my back and an arrow from my quiver.

  Panting, thudding footsteps and the wet clink-patter of the mournling’s many legs flew across the courtyard as the last soldier fled for his life. I stepped toward the edge of the platform and took aim with my bow toward the creature’s neck, knowing that however true my strike, it wouldn’t be enough to kill it. I had to try, had to do something.

  Beside me, Devrim held perfectly still, no bolts of light bursting from his hands like he’d used in the chamber with the well of healing.

  I released the arrow. It twanged off the creature’s armored skin a breath before the soldier screamed his last. His head went one way, one leather-covered arm another.

  I sighed, defeated, and dropped my arm, my bow dangling uselessly by my side.

  Hytham hovered on the other edge of the platform and still watched the creature, gauging its movements.

  “A great many surprises,” the herald repeated.

  I turned about to find the cold glint of his glare fixed upon me. Chills rippled along my back. Surely he couldn’t be suggesting that I’d had anything to do with the creature’s reappearance. How had it even found us here? I had no control over mournlings, though I did wish to understand them. Would he hold me responsible as he had Bansaerin? My breaths grew shorter. The likelihood of tunnels leading from the forest to here, or of the cavern Hytham and I had searched being part of the isla—it didn’t make sense. If anything, the creature seemed to follow Devrim’s command, for I knew it wasn’t my own.

  “Hmm.” The herald’s eyes narrowed. “Potential indeed, but I must know how much.”

  He stretched out his giant hand and struck me in the small of my back. Devrim shoved me from the platform and sent me, screaming and flailing, toward the slithering mournling beast below.