Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 136009 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 680(@200wpm)___ 544(@250wpm)___ 453(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 136009 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 680(@200wpm)___ 544(@250wpm)___ 453(@300wpm)
“Do you think he’d take all the magical artifacts and leave the metal crown? It was in the book. Even if he didn’t know what it did, he’d take it.”
“Then he already has it. Would you prefer that?”
“No.”
“Then keep looking.”
Kerrigan moved through the space. It was massive. It must have been made for truly spectacular treasure back in the day. The fact that Bastian had completely emptied it gave her a foreboding feeling.
Alura had been the one to tell them that Bastian was building a magical artifact arsenal. It was Clover who had located one of the warehouses where it was being kept. They had assumed it was out of the mountain because keeping all their weapons under a mountain in a magic-suppressive room while planning a war just wasn’t practical. But Kerrigan had assumed that he hadn’t moved out everything.
She’d been wrong.
They all had.
Bastian was two steps ahead of them, as he had been all along. Kerrigan had been the one to get him access to the vault in the first place. Of course he would seal it all up so she couldn’t get anything from it.
“He knew,” Kerrigan said as Fordham strode back toward her empty-handed. “He must have known.”
“How? Do you think we have a spy?”
“I don’t know who. Dozan is ruthless.”
“He always has been, but we had that slip with Barron,” Fordham reminded her. “Someone in the inner circle knew about our plans.”
“It could have been anyone. Dozan cleaned the place out after that. He only put people he trusted in the House of Shadows, and he has a dozen people in Draco Mountain as well, besides Alura, who did not know this had been cleared out.”
“It could be Audria.”
Kerrigan shot him a look. “Why? Because of Roake?”
He shrugged. “Maybe she does love him.”
“I don’t want to second-guess our allies. Who can we trust if we start doing that?”
“The fact of the matter is that our circle is no longer small,” he said as he rummaged through a chest. “When we got the dragons, it necessitated becoming larger. It could be anyone in Bryonica, Concha, Venatrix, or any number of other houses.” He threw aside the jewels that dumped out of a chest as he kicked over another, letting coins clatter to the ground. “It could be my own people. It could be the dragons for all we know.”
“We’re too big to be thinking like this.”
Fordham kicked over another chest in anger. “Fine. Let’s just use the crystal to check for the crown and then get out of here.”
Shadows bloomed in Fordham’s hand, and he reached into a pocket of the nothing and grasped a chunk of white crystal the size of his palm.
“Show-off,” she grumbled. She still hadn’t been able to make the Ollivier trick work for her even though Wynter claimed it was easier than jumping.
“Parlor tricks,” Fordham said with a shrug.
When Kerrigan had come back from the plane and told Fordham all that she had learned, he’d realized that they had this crystal in the House of Shadows. He hadn’t even known it was tendrille.
They’d toyed with it for a while to try to get it to work, and after much back-and-forth, they discovered that they could power it with some magic. It didn’t make much sense because tendrille negated magic, but the tendrille at the Holy Mountain held Ferrinix’s memory.
Unlike gray and black tendrille, the white crystal lit up from the inside out, and when it got close to a magical artifact, the crystal would begin to vibrate.
Unfortunately, Kerrigan couldn’t use it while she had her mother’s bracelet on. So she watched as Fordham concentrated in the oppressive room, digging out a bit of magic that felt like being dunked underwater and trying to breathe. But a small bit of magic filtered up, and he pressed it into the tendrille, where it glowed and began to vibrate, indicating a magical artifact was nearby.
Kerrigan held her wrist up. “Bracelet.”
“Right,” Fordham said, pointing the crystal elsewhere.
“Take it around the rest of the room, and see if you find anything else.”
Fordham was all the way to the back of the vault when a commotion sounded from the other side of the door. Kerrigan put her ear to it. Had the guards been found? Was it a shift change?
Then she heard it—a clicking noise.
“Quick,” she told Fordham. “They’re opening the vault door.”
“Almost done!” he called back as he continued around the room. “He must have already taken it. It’s only working for your bracelet.”
Kerrigan sighed. “Maybe the crown isn’t here. Maybe it never was.”
Fordham pocketed the crystal as he returned to her side. “Portal us out.”
Kerrigan clicked her mother’s bracelet around her wrist and felt for that place where she could access the portal magic. It was fuzzy around the edges. Still she reached for it, the door sparking to life for a moment before fizzling out.